Ciao, Los Angeles
Early morning drizzle on the canal out my window in Amsterdam, first morning after the end of European Summer Time. How appropriate that my ‘summer vacation’ ends and my first night in Europe is the end of their summer time. During my month in LA I took essentially no photos – was far more interested in yoga, cultural & restaurant outings with friends, bike rides and general relaxation. Moreover, LA was hit with heavier and more frequent than usual October rains and cool temperatures, so there were rarely such views as those above and below from the lovely roof deck of the place I stayed in Venice.
For those curious who don’t already know, the plans are now fairly clear – I’m here in Holland for two weeks of training, then visit various friends and family types in northern Germany and Berlin, followed by time in Paris to get my French back to high proficiency before having to work in it full time, and finally back to Amsterdam to brief and fly to Democratic Republic of Congo. That’ll happen in mid-December, and thereafter I’ll be quite out of touch — both because I’ll be quite busy again and because my internet access will be much more limited.
That’s all I really have to say now – still a bit jetlagged, but knew if I didn’t get these photos up I never would, and felt I should do something to acknowledge leaving the home continent again. I’m trying not to worry too much about the US elections coming up shortly. I’m encouraging myself to be moved by generous and hopeful impulses more than anything else. Take care.
Northern Coastlines, Towns and Forests
…so it’s September 21 and smw, slt has been in SF for six weeks that have flown by in a blur. We’ve been back in the US nearly four months – again, time that’s flown past with family, friends, meditation weeks on Star Island and yoga classes in San Francisco. Amazingly, the last phase of my planned down-time will arrive next week when I head off to Los Angeles to create some final mental-vacuum space in my head, into which I’ll then start leveraging all the new information about wherever it is I’ll be working next. More on that when the time is right, for those interested – it’s slowly becoming clearer, but nothing is yet very definite.
For now I wanted simply to share some photos of my beloved California, land to which my heart always wants to return. This blog has shown very little of my spiritual home in the US for a while, since I was tied down on the East Coast and out of the country most of the time between September 2007 and … well, last month. So herewith a bit of the northern coastline. True, the photo immediately above just shows you the sunset & moonrise view from the top of Bernal Hill, which I’m fortunate to be able to call my home in SF thanks to dear friends who make room for me in their lives & family when I’m here. But SF is only either the beginning of northern California, or the end of central California, depending on how you choose to view it. The real north begins when you cross the Golden Gate Bridge, or even when you get farther up into the coastal redwood forests of Humboldt and Del Norte counties. I did that, the first weekend in September, on a five-day road & hiking trip with a Howard & Jim & Shantanu that took us all the way up to the Oregon border, and did some great exploring of forests, coasts and towns along the way.
…that’s me on a log in a waterfall within Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park. And below, a view of the Smith River upstream from the Redwood Park near a watering hole where lots of folks were floating on inner tubes and sunning themselves on a sandy beach.
The photo above is actually Oregon, just over the border – where we stayed for a few nights was right on the border, so our beach walks easily took us over into Oregon; further down are some close-ups of beach flotsam and seaweed which are also Oregon seaweed, and Oregon flotsam. Below, my friends by a mural in the AWESOME haven of Arcata, one of the spiritual hubs of the Humboldt Nation and, I hope, a future US home base for yours truly.
A view of Arcata Bay from the hill Arcata, above; and below, a carved deceased tree trunk in the Arcata community forest. How many other towns in the world can you think of that have an enormous redwood community forest??
The evening we arrived in Arcata, there was a folk band playing some music right there on the plaza in the heart of town. Kids were dancing, bikers were stopping to listen, and the sun streamed down.
Arcata: a university town fronted by a lovely bay, backed by a community redwood forest, centered by a plaza that flies the US flag, the California flag, and the earth-as-seen-from-space flag. Oh, yeah, and a place that certainly stands to benefit if Californians decide to vote in favor of the ballot measure that would fully legalize – and fully tax – the marijuana trade, by way of compensating for all that federal money no longer coming to support basic needs in our state now that our national budgets have been so constrained by needless, endless wars that prior administrations launched so casually, and that we and the world are still saddled with… Thanks again, Geo W and all you republican hypocrites who like government deficit spending when it’s to kill people halfway across the world, but not when it’s to build schools and railways and other things that help keep real people alive and leading real lives.
Below: lighthouse at Crescent City, the northernmost town of any size (i.e. 8000 or so inhabitants) in California.
Above: Howard and me in California; below: pinecones, kelp, driftwood and seaweed in Oregon.
There is no good way to capture, on a still photo, the magnificence of a mature and large redwood forest – or even of a single massive redwood tree. Those who’ve been to Muir Woods just over the Golden Gate from SF, or to the groves of mountain redwoods tucked into pockets of Yosemite and Sequioa National Parks, have some idea. But these northern coastal redwood forests are enormous – hillsides and valley bottoms covered in ferns, with entire forests of towering redwoods rising majestically far into the sky from the quiet, mossy & ferny bottoms. Above is a particularly monumental tree that’s been named ‘Boy Scout Tree’ within the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park – you can get a sense of its enormity by how tiny Howard & I are against its trunk. Imagine entire hillsides and valleys full of trees not that much smaller than this one, without really very many people around since it’s all very far from anywhere else, and you get an idea how wonderful these parks are!
Gardens & Trails – Peninsula & Southbay
When it’s possible, I do all in my power to get to SF/Bay Area for the first two weekends in August – because on those two weekends, the wonderful Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music happens in & around Santa Cruz. Howard and Gene first introduced me to the festival in the late 90’s, and I’ve tried to go every chance I’ve had since I started working w/MSF since live music and live performing arts in general are something I miss when I’m in the field. All of these photos were taken on the weekends we spent on the peninsula and in the south bay areas – hikes in the afternoons before evening concerts, an exploration of Filoli Gardens which is a lovely house and garden in the hills north of Palo Alto. If anyone wonders why I try to get back here as often as I can, the photos above and below may give you some ideas. 🙂
Marvelous Memories of Manipur
so much world, so little time has finally managed to sort the hundreds of photos that accumulated during my last months in Manipur and my weeks of travel in northern Europe after I left India. You’ll note that we’ve also settled on a new blog site – something we’ve felt needed doing since our last posts from India, showing the sights and scenes of my lovely vacation in Kerala. Why, you ask? My old site, paulbrockmann.blogspot.com, had introduced a new photo editor which made it impossible for more than one or two photo-heavy posts like mine to appear on the main page. They didn’t even offer me any choices, as the current host does, about paying for upgrades to allow a heavier front page…they just changed it and – shazam – many of you were suddenly unable to understand, for example, that I posted four different ‘stories’ or entries about Kerala. In the 5-1/2 years I posted at blogspot, I’d developed a certain style and many of you had gotten used to it. I know who most of my readers are because you’re mostly my friends, family & colleagues from around the world. I hope you’ll feel the current site allows you a better overview of what I’ve been doing than the old site under its new posting rules. All of the old posts, from February 2005 on, have been imported here – but honestly, they show up better there if you can take the time to click on the individual link for each one, because the wordpress importer shrank all the photos. I’m also going to have to figure out a way to show an ‘archive’ column on the left or right of my main page, so it’s easier to navigate to the past entries. But for now, I wanted to show you some of these lovely memories of my nine months in Manipur, along with – lower down – some visual highlights from my weeks exploring new parts of northern Europe.
My style has necessarily changed with this new blog: many of the photos appear far larger than they ever did before; to balance that, many of the other images will appear in gallery format so it doesn’t take so much time to load and scan through the pages. In all cases, you can click on a photo to see a full-size version, or its name. Some of the names will tell you something, many are more for my information than the general public’s. Please give me feedback: what you do and don’t like about the posts, the text, the new host, the photos, the design, my current hair style, you name it. Write on my own address, if you want, or leave a comment here – which is pretty easy to do, I think. (Guess I’ll find out, huh?) Above all, I hope you enjoy these peeks of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing since January.
Coming back one day on the road between Sugnu and Tuining, the skies just opened up – hail, massive rain, rivers in the roads. Below is a school being evacuated after the creek by which it sits got a bit too big for its banks from the same storm – the shot below was taken about 10km and 30 minutes down the road after the shot above.
Though I left Manipur nearly three months ago (!!) and have been back in the US nearly two months, somehow I simply haven’t gotten to sorting these photos, settling on a new blog host, and deciding what and how to show you all. Believe it or not, I’ve eliminated well over half the photos from posting. I’m afraid that I’m still asking you to look at a LOT of photos, but I find Manipur, its people and places, so endlessly photogenic and interesting. If you’ve followed so much world, so little time for while, then you know I have a basic rule that this blog is about my experiences as a person and not really about the work I do in the places I go with MSF. However, in the case of these photos I’ve decided to include more photos taken on the job, or taken of me at the job, than I normally would. I’m also including, farther down, a whole gallery of faces of colleagues, friends and patients from Manipur. I hope these people don’t mind appearing here, and I hope they and readers all understand that I do this as tribute and thanks to the people, places and communities that have left strong impressions and lasting memories with me. Spending a year in Manipur, I hope, helped me learn more humility: the face of MSF that donor countries normally see is the ‘expatriate,’ best known in the US from characters on the TV shows Will & Grace or ER that do similar work. But in Manipur, perhaps even more than in most MSF projects, it’s really our locally-hired national staff who make possible the work we do. In a region with so many different languages and histories, none of us international staff would get much of anywhere in terms of productive work without relying very heavily on the local ‘national’ staff who are really the backbone of most MSF projects. I’ll have, further down, some shots that are fairly obviously work related; but throughout this section I hope you’ll enjoy the people and scenes of Manipur where I think MSF is doing such good work.
As I write this I’m in a lovely vacation rental in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Even here, various folks I’ve chatted with talk with pride of how they support MSF. And well they should be proud — it’s the small donors who make it possible for us to work in places like Manipur. Ask yourself if you’d ever heard of Manipur before I went to work there; and ask yourself how Manipur ranks in the donor-awareness of most citizens of the world compared to, say, Haiti. Haiti certainly has great needs – and indeed MSF has been and remains heavily engaged there both pre- and post-January 2010. But it’s the millions of private donors around the world who allow MSF to look at a small isolated place like Manipur, and decide to try to respond to some unmet medical needs there in a way that both preserves life and restores dignity, and hopefully also helps support the government’s own provision of longer-term solutions than we alone can provide. It’s my strong belief that MSF and all our colleagues and donors should be proud of the work we do in Manipur. I’m off my high-horse – enjoy the pics.
…immediately above, and for a while below, are scenes from the main town parts of Churachandpur; yes, including the pig trying to get out of his sty, which was more in a neighborhood just behind where our main house and office were located.
…from fairly fancy houses and shops, to streetfront shops and pigstys, CCpur’s got it all…
Below is the view from our house, more precisely the view from the bathroom I used most days to shower and brush my teeth and so on. Not a bad view, huh? Quick review & explanation for those who don’t know: maybe 1/3 of Manipur’s total population is made up of people belonging to various hill tribes such as Gangte, Kuki, Miso, Naga, Paite, Vaiphei, Zou etc. (More than 40 recognized minorities make up the 2-1/2 million residents of Manipur.) Nearly all of the hill tribal folks were converted to Christianity by missionaries from the US and UK in the early 20th century – indeed, below you’ll see a festive arch commemorating the ‘gospel centenary,’ i.e. 100 years since those first missionaries introduced Christianity to that part of Manipur. Since we lived, and primarily worked, in Churachandpur and other hill tribal areas, we saw a lot of churches — and they make an interesting visual against the lovely mountains. The majority population in Manipur are the mainly valley-dwelling Meitei or Manipuris, who’ve been living in this little valley for something like 2000 years and have a long history of art and culture of which they are quite proud. The Meitei are about 80% (so I’ve been told) Hindu these days, having largely converted when a king led them to do so in the 18th century (I think); the remaining 20% or so mostly adhere to the Meitei or Manipuri indigenous religion, which existed before the conversion to Hinduism. There are some churches in the valley, but I don’t think many Meitei are Christian.
I seem inevitably to end up with many shots of clothes hung out to dry. Mostly it’s because there are always clothes hung out to dry somewhere; it’s also because clothes are colorful and interesting in a photo. It also helps me remind me of what we Americans should remember more: our problems with resources and oil in the gulf are of our own making. And the wars we fight are of our own making, because we greedily overconsume the world’s resources and then find we must fight wars to defend our access to those resources, and place our troops in places where they’re not welcome, just to defend our access to as many cars and clothes dryers as each of us feels we need. Yes, our decisions do have consequences, and yes, it’s very possible to live a happy and rich life without all the SUV’s and clothes dryers. Or oil in the gulf – for which don’t blame BP, look at your own consumption and wonder why companies do what they do and why congress gives companies so many free passes…
On a lighter note: below are some shots from the longest weekend hike that Par, Fiona and I did during my time: up and over a few large hills and around the trail you can see below. Also a shot of Par and me on the walk. This was, obviously, late in the dry season. Quite different from the verdant look during the rains, huh? BTW, in case clarification is necessary: we weird foreigners used these trails for recreation; for locals they’re how to get your produce to market and do your shopping trips.
Several friends commented on photos of the architecture in Manipur. Above is an excellent example of a good-looking completely traditional hill compound — thatched-reed or rush roof, construction of planks and mud and reeds. This compound shows great civic pride and good upkeep – it’s swept, the wood is neatly stacked, the roof rushes are new and fresh-looking — it’s all really lovely, isn’t it? Our new house in Sugnu, which I was fortunate to spend a few nights in before leaving, is of similar construction but painted a bright blue and with a (bloody loud in rain, but longer-lasting) tin roof; you’ll see it below. I can attest that these houses, while picturesque, are not so comfortable or weather-sound as brick or stone structures; it’s maybe like a midpoint between camping and a solid house with a basement. In any case: below are some examples of houses that haven’t been quite so well maintained, or that finally succumbed to the elements.
This one is woven bamboo with a tin roof. I think it’s got a gorgeous location and is a very atmospheric house.
The foot bridge and the deep-purple orchids are both from one of our favorite hike resting spots, by a little creek in a valley between two ridges that are both lovely and dramatic. The orchids are standing in for any number of other stunning orchids and other flowers I saw but didn’t photograph during my time…especially these bluey-lilac orchids that were hanging enchantingly from a number of trees sometime around October, but I never happened to have a camera handy any time I saw them.
Blankets, hung out to air and dry on a footbridge at the edge of CCpur town.
Above: while Par waits for me to catch up on one of our morning ‘hill and valley’ (our favorite route, really) runs, I took this photo of all the water ewers piled up by the village’s water spigot, waiting for the morning water run by all the locals fetching their washing and cooking water. Below, two locals doing just that…both likely wearing second-hand clothing that’s come from the US, but one more obviously so.
Up above is a photo I like because it shows how steep some of the terrain where folks do their farming is. Immediately above is another shot of the almost-scary sunset on the last night I spent in Sugnu, the new town where we were starting to work just as I was leaving. And below are a few shots more directly related to work. Just below is the clinic compound at Chakpikarong, a more remote town than CCpur where we started work shortly after I arrived; it, like many other health structures in the area, was not open and fully staffed with any regularity, and part of what we try to do is provide a regular schedule so that residents of remote villages (people were walking sometimes many hours to get to us) would know they could come to us reliably and get care. We also try to work in collaboration with staff (medical, lab, etc.) assigned by the health department in order to support overall greater provision of care. Below this next shot, you’ll see a ‘Children’s Park’ in also in Chakpikarong, which I put in just by way of saying that it’s not only health structures that have been a bit abandoned and unmaintained during the years when various conflicts have so strongly affected life in Manipur. But as I said above, I think this is an area of which most of the world remains unaware; it’s certainly an area where no other INGO’s, so far s I know, have any regular on the ground presence. Another reason I’m proud of the work we do there. 🙂
Immediately above: first day we occupied our new house/office in Sugnu (it rained, heavily) and hired staff to watch the compound, clean/cook, and help us get acquainted with our new neighborhood and its various communities. A lot of people showed up, as you see, and it was quite a full day! Below, appropriately as the last shot in this set, me eating with some of our local colleagues at my farewell party.
Colleagues, Patients & Friends in Manipur
In the posts above, you’ve already seen many of the people who made my life in Manipur so rewarding — colleagues both national and international, patients and their families, neighbors and residents of the town we lived in and the town we worked in, and so on. For me the most humbling part of working with MSF in an area like Manipur is the welcome that MSF and our staff (both national and international) receive in the small towns and villages where we work. Most of the photos in this section were taken during the final couple weeks of my time in Manipur – in final visits to the clinics where we worked, during the handover with my replacement, and during my farewell party (that’s some colleagues singing at the farewell party which was also a family get-together, above). These big photos, and the gallery of images below, are a final thank you and ode to some of the many people I worked with and around during my months in Manipur.
This young patient at one of our clinics started out dubious about this weird balding guy who wanted to take his picture…
…but with encouragement from me and some of the mom’s sitting around (their shown below), he started to warm up…
…and finally let loose. 🙂
Below are the smiling adults who encouraged him. One of them might be his Mom but I’m not sure.
Magna Cum Confusion & Humor
Since beginning this MSF phase of my life, I’ve lived & worked in three regions which the British ruled as colonies for some period of time. Along with that British colonial history comes a greater familiarity with English among at least more educated people. English is a good lingua franca in Nigeria, whose people speak hundreds of tribal languages in their homes and families. I think English is actually a bit less widespread in India because there are superpower regional languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, etc. which are spoken by very large numbers of people. But India certainly has a group of highly-educated citizens whose English is often far more refined than mine. Then there are the unique forms English takes as it adapts to local needs and usages – I recall an article in Nigeria’s Punch newspaper about how unusual Nigerian English was becoming; so unusual that the editorial writer feared it was moving out of the mainstream of global English and becoming nearly incomprehensible to other English speakers. I don’t think Indian English runs that risk…but I did find some things to enjoy and to have a chuckle about. Or simply some very nice uses of the language. Herewith are some of my favorite signs and monuments, with a strong emphasis on the Indian penchant for using the latinate cum as a junction between two different parts of one whole. I and my colleagues sometimes found these signs rather humorous.
…and, directly across the street in the the center of Churachandpur Town:
I don’t want this post to disintegrate into a bad joke – though indeed Fiona & Marja & I got some great laughs out of the signs just above, and some others that you’ll see.
The parts of Manipur that I frequented were big on commemorations and memorials, many of which were nicely made. At left and right are two stone memorials commemorating important anniveraries in local history. I’m hoping that these will all lay out, when finally up on screen, more or less as I’d been hoping. We’ll see – learning a new blog host is hard!
Seeing Sweden – The Old Country
I left India in early May, and spent most of the month exploring and visiting friends and family in Germany, Sweden & Denmark. Above & below are some of my very favorite images from the wonderful week I spent in Stockholm & Gothenburg. Despite having actual relatives in Sweden, I’d never yet been there. I began with several lovely days en famille with one of my cousins and her kids & husband at their cottage on a hillside overlooking a truly gorgeous lake in the country outside Gothenburg. I also met/saw other cousins and toured Gothenburg a bit, as well as seeing some of the lovely archipelago of islands off the coast of Gothenburg, on one of which my cousin’s daughter goes to school. After that I spent a few days on my own exploring stunning Stockholm. Above & below, the country-looking shots above are all from around Gothenburg, and the city-looking ones are all around Stockholm. More explanations as we move along…and as I as I learn what I can and can’t do with this new blog host…
Stockholm is an impressive and gorgeous city laid out on islands, a few isthmuses, and various peninsulas surrounded by lakes and rivers and harbors which all connect up at some point through twisty channels with the northern Baltic sea – witness my photos with a few of the cruise ships that ply the various northern & eastern Baltic routes. There’s an island old town complete with large royal palace (whence the impressive bronze lion you saw above) and cobblestone streets, a really lovely harbor dotted with islands and a well-organized city with parks on hills and lovely streets in all directions. When I was there in mid-May, the days were long and most were spectactularly sunny — even this early in the year, the sky was not dark until after 23:00 and already getting light again at 03:00. Wow! My most memorable day was a wander around Djurgarden, a long and green royal hunting park on an island in Stockholm’s extensive harbor. Aside from being a hunting park, it seems to also have several private homes and I found myself envying the folks lucky enough to live on this gorgeous green oasis surrounded by the city. This next set of shots are all from Djurgarden, including outdoor sculpture both at the actual museum situated on the island, and dotted around the island in many other locations…just because they could, I guess. 🙂
…I’m not sure what these guys are, but they were wandering around the Djurgarden and I found them both interesting and somewhat intimidating.
Next up, more shots from Gothenburg and the archipelago — islands with names like Ockero, which when spelled correctly has umlauts over both O’s, but my keyboard doesn’t allow that. I’m belatedly thanking Cecilia, Lars, Sara & Alexander for being such great hosts, and Johanna & Charles & Erika for coming out to spend time with me also. While the city of Gothenburg isn’t quite so spectacular as the city of Stockholm, it’s got a great feel to it, the surrounding countryside is gorgeous, and the archipelago sits like a string of jewels in the clean blue seas of the Kattegat — which is the name of that stetch of water between Jutland and Sweden which connects the Baltic Sea with the North Sea (who knew?).
In Denmark’s Capital
ok, everyone – so much world, so little time has moved. consider this the change of address notice. the changes blogger had made affected my last posts from kerala so extremely that i simply decided i had to try something new, and a few friends have told me wordpress is well worth a try.
this post is both a test of some new ways of displaying photos on my blog, and a record of what i consider the least visually interesting set of photos from my post-manipur travels. once i get caught up, there will be posts with far more photos from the final months in manipur, plus some lovely shots of my time in sweden after i returned to europe. but for now, enjoy this gallery of thumbnails from copenhagen, and know that you can click on any individual photo to learn what it is, and to see it in full size. feedback is very welcome. thanks!
India’s Tip – Kanyakumari & Padmanabaphuram
Padmanabaphuram Palace, above and farther below, was home to the kings of Travancore, straddling modern-day southern Kerala and bits of Tamil Nadu. It’s the most exquisite example of traditional Keralan architecture still standing. Below, and then even further below, are shots of sunrise and sunset at Kanyakumari at India’s southernmost tip.
Open doors between train cars could be a dangerous enticement. Ever an adrenaline junkie, I’m tempted most on the bridges suspended over a wide, shallow river with banks of deep red soil: so tempting to make the leap and join all those kids down below playing and bathing, adults doing their ablutions and women washing laundry. Barring that, simply to sit in the doorway, hand wrapped around the nearest fixed object and to lean my head into the onrushing wind like a dog on the highway to scan the red-dirt villages, coconut & banana groves, trails full of kids on bikes and adults carrying loads on their heads or backs, is far more enticing than the dark and cool of my 3rd A/C coach seat through that other door to my right. But at least this way I’ve a retreat for when the heat overtakes me or the rushing wind dries my eyes…or when we’re stopped in station and the urine stench from those who couldn’t wait for the long station-stop to end before responding to nature’s call overwhelms my tender nostrils.
The four-hour journey from Varkala south to Kanyakumari takes me through Thiruvanatapuram, Kerala’s second city & seat of government, and past the tourist haven of Kovalam to its south, onward to India’s tip where three oceans meet: Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean & Bay of Bengal; waters especially holy to Hindu devotees of the virgin goddess Kumari. I’ve been in flatlands since I landed at Kochi a week earlier – much of the backwaters is below sea level, prone to flooding when the monsoon is heavy and vibrantly, endlessly green even now, several months into the dry season. As tthe rain follows the continent’s curve eastward to join the subcontinent’s east coast curving down to the narrow tip, I notice that our inward, eastward curve brings the southern reaches of the Ghats, mountains whose name I’ve read but never before seen, within range of my curious and questing eye. Strangely, after the verdant aqueous landscapes I’ve been surrounded by for weeks, my firs view of these southern outposts of the Ghats calls me back to the desert of southern New Mexico and the Organ Mountains between Las Cruces and Alamogordo, so named because their sculpted vertical rock faces are reminiscent of an organ’s pipes.
The British, in their wisdom, decided that Kanyakumari – like many Indian locations – needed a name easier for their palates and brains to keep track of. So they called it Cape Comorin. Personally I find Kanyakumari far more flavorful, and it carries with it the name of the virgin goddess Kumari who did her penance here in order to marry Shiva (I’m fairly sure he’s another avatar of Krishna, but who could possibly keep track of all these deities and their avatars?), only to be told by the powers-that-be that she should remain virginal ‘in order to save the world,’ so saith my guidebook. Interesting notion, that. In any case: Kanyakumari is a gorgeously situated little town where the east coast and west coast of India meet in a tip pointing south, where three oceans come together and create water even more special than most rivers and seacoasts in India. Thus come the pilgrims to bathe at sunrise and sunset, thus come the sick and lame in hopes of cure; thus come the groups of schoolkids to scream with joy at the sun’s rise and set each day. The atmosphere at sunrise and sunset here, each day, is a combination fourth-of-july, carnival, and Indian temple, all to the accompaniment of pounding waves, vendors hocking tea or decorated seashells or chile-spiced pineapple slices.
These particular schoolgirls were quite determined to impress the sun, their teachers, or perhaps the schoolboys clumped in their own groups with the conviction and determination of their screams in honor of the rising sun.
The big statue represents Tiruvalluvar, apparently one of the great Tamil poets. To the left is the temple to Kumari (I think), and somewhere in there is a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, where his ashes were kept after death until immersion. I was lazy by this point in my vacation so I only really got out to see the sun go up and down, and didn’t do much else.
Views of Two Varkalas
There are two Varkalas. There’s the internationally-popular beach resort where pale-skinned (or lobster-skinned, depending how well they applied their sun screen), imported men and women wearing far less than any decent Indian would be caught dead in wander the cliffside path past trinket stores, Tibetan-prayer-flag stores, and restaurants with names like “Clafouti” and “Cafe del Mar,” nearly all of which specialize (their own word) in most cuisines known to modern man — North & South Indian, Chinese, Italian, Continental, Thai…basically, you name it you get it. Except Mexican. Didn’t find that, even at Cafe del Mar. [Sad Face.] 
Then there’s the ancient temple town to which pilgrims come to pay homage to Krisha at the 2,000-year-old Janardhana Swamy Temple, a place pure enough of practice that non-Hindus are normally not permitted entry; the town like many Indian beach and river towns where sunrise rites and blessings are conducted by the religious and their teachers at water’s edge. In Varkala, this means the beach has two distinct shifts: the sunrise shift of worshipers and purifying bathers (always quite clothed: religious Indians don’t strip down too much before entering the water, and are NOT thinking about their tan lines) plus the occasional early-rising Euro-American meditator, jogger, or beach-comber (often most incongruous in shorts and sports bra passing through the wafts of incense and chanted prayers). 
Once the sun’s fully up and prepared to burn those tanlines deep into backs and waists, out parade the Euro-chic in their gauzy wraps over thongs, madras shirts over speedos, straw hats with hair tied back in ponytail (unisex styling, that), books and frisbee in hand. Ne’er do the two groups, the two Varkalas, seem to really meet or interact. It’s rather remarkable, and all most beautiful and fascinating. And I do have tanlines again…
I couldn’t help putting both these photos up – the blurred and the unblurred: it was quite unintentional but when I looked at them I rather liked the one where my hand moved. 
Above: temple zone on a festival day; below: morning religious shift at the beach.
Cruising Kerala’s Backwaters
The heart of my week in Kerala was four days at a hotel then a houseboat in the backwaters, a large network of rivers and canals a bit inland from the ocean in central Kerala. One of the more peaceful times I’ve spent.
This is the backwater equivalent of the school bus. 
I think this is the backwater equivalent of running the daily errands. 
The backwaters are highway, swimming pool, bathtub, tourist attraction, supermarket for herons & egrets & cormorants, seagulls & terns and other water birds; source of income and food for thousands of fishing families…and, above all in my eyes and ears this morning, launderette. Keralan women (plus the occasional man) can be heard and seen punishing the dirt and sweat, drips and dribbles of coconut juice and chutney, grass stains and just plain dirt out of their families’ clothes up and down the length and breadth of every canal and river throughout this vast network of water. That the clothes survive the merciless slapping out of all these stains and dirt must testify to the quality fo Kerala’s spinners and weavers. Many a shirt I’ve worn would dissolve to shreds at such treatment. A woman dunks the offending garment deep under the tepid green water, pulls it out, lathers it with a bar of soap, swings it high above her head in a one-armed lasso motion, then — THWACK! — whips it down on the nearest flat rock, with the fury of one to whom cleanliness truly must be close to godliness…and who has every intention of achieving for herself and her family’s clothing, at least, both states. Lather, rinse, repeat thwack, all along the highways and byways of this watery world.
So here I am at dawn on the backwaters of Kerala, watching herons and egrets do their breakfast dives and stabs into the water. A few of the more intriguing songbirds are still calling to each other, but mostly the sounds are crows, a loudspeaker reaching across the water from a nearby temple, and the occasional horn trilling from an unseen road. (And many Indian horns do trill, multi-note melodies that go into an echo-fade thing for a few seconds – so much more Indian in ethos than the stolid northern-European, Anglo-American, single-note horns that just thrust themselves into the audioscape and then as suddenly retire. I’m called momentary to a reverie of LA’s highways packed with colorfully-decorated Indian-style vehicles, all blaring their horns in a cacaphony of receding trills…certainly more interesting than the standard-issue LA rush-hour traffic jam.) There’s the occasional electric-blue flash of wings skimming the water’s surface, which I assume is the kingfisher, so fleeting and elusive that I’ve never captured it on camera. So startlingly, dazzlingly blue in this green world that I wonder if I’ve imagined it, until it happens again. I lie on my bench seat, head turned so I can gaze out on the watery highway extending in front of the boat and listen to clothes thwack on rocks, watch white egrets & black cormorants & the occasional electric-blue kingfisher feast on the fish smorgasbord beneath me.
My brother (one of them) informs me that, in removing myself from the shores of my native land, by placing myself in this self-imposed virtual exile where the world is my oyster but no place is my home, I have reduced my odds of ever meeting Mr Right to 0:0. His logic is well-presented: hard to date anyone local since I’ll always be leaving at some point, plus there are usually reporting relationships and work complications, and meeting Joe Citizen can be a real challenge most of the time anyway, at least in a neutral non-work way…after all, I kind of stand out as one of a dozen or so foreigners in the entire state. Then there’s the fact that most of the places I work now have cultures that tend, to a greater or lesser extent, to be even more opposed than my southern-Ohio birthplace to the queer manner in which my search for affection expresses itself.
It’s true that five years of doing this work have led me nowhere romantically, though the stories I can now tell when back in places where I blend in a bit better do seem to gain me more attention at parties and among those types I tend to admire most, than my suit & tie business self used to. However, I did make a decision after eight years of equally sparse success in the malls, dance clubs and tennis courts of LA and SF, that hunting the ideal mate there was rather like a seeking a tropical fish on dry land: the people drawn to the shopping malls and nightclubs of the world are birds of a different feather than me. So now I at least do work that interests and truly challenges me, in new ways and different ways that I hope do more than contribute only to the bottom line of the two fairly addled entrepreneurs for whom I was, before I left LA, working.
I figure this way, if I end my days single I’ll at least have some good stories to tell and a higher ratio of job satisfaction than many of us do. The alternative, hanging in dull jobs and silly dating events that add little newness to my life, seemed to promise an endless cycle of diminishing-return jobs and first dates that never really lifted off the ground of their clumsy first greetings. I am still largely an optimist, but I have realized that if corporations can rise and fall on the fortunes of movies and books and magazines that tell stories and offer advice to help women in their search for the right man…well if that standard-issue search is difficult enough of success to spawn the industries it’s spawned, then how much more difficult of success is my own, and should I really put the rest of my life on hold while clinging to what optimism remains to me?
My point being: here I am, a lone passenger exploring life, at the moment from the prow of a small houseboat in Kerala, and it seems such a terrible waste that there’s no one here to share it with me. House-boating on the Keralan backwaters joins Paul’s endlessly-growing list of things to do with a boyfriend if he ever meets one; right up there with ‘weekend at Big Sur’ or ‘vacation in Provincetown.’ If I’ve learned anything it’s that we’re really all the same in the end, and though the surroundings may change, a human being wants connection, respect and a place to feel at home. And for now I’ve got wading and flying waterbirds to watch, hundreds of miles of canals and backwaters to occupy my imagination, and apparently some idli (google it) on the way for breakfast. It’s not at all a bad position, all things considered.
Above: street scene in Kottayam, northeasternmost corner of the backwaters and site of Arundhati Roy’s celebrated book, God of Small Things. Below: it’s not Long Beach…it’s Queen Mary of the Backwaters.
Above & below: my guesthouse in Kumarakom (Keralan architecture is really quite lovely – as seen especially below, in the photos of Padmanabaphuram Palace), and farther down, the crew of my little houseboat. 
Arriving in Kochi
We soar above dense layers and palaces, columns and turrets and tufts of cloud so dense and fantastical that the guy in the middle seat, to my left, grabs his cell phone and leans over me – elbow dug painfully into my rib with only minimal nod of apology – to digitally record the wonder. Here above the clouds, the increasingly tropical sun shines so brightly that I’ve shed a layer, and turned the air vent on high. I’m still hot enough to find inconceivable that six hours ago I needed the room heater upon emerging from the morning’s shower in Delhi. Once the plane cuts down into the cloud palaces, I pop the outer shirt back on, unbuttoned.
Fort Kochi, aka Cochin, is home to an active harbor and fishing water front, the oldest church in India (I think – see side view below with kids playing cricket) and no dearth of other christian symbols & buildings, the oldest synagogue in India and the small remnants of a Jewish community whose ancestors came here after the destruction of the (2nd?) temple in Jerusalem a few thousand years ago, and a lot of cool & atmospheric houses, streets and waterfronts. 
Plunging through the clouds, a definable landscape emerges for the first time since brief reflections of sun on water somewhere over Karnataka or Maharashtra. Closing in on ground level, the seemingly omnipresent carpet of trees resolves itself into dense, endless stands of coconut palms. From the runway, and again from the car driving south to town, the setting sun hangs as an equatorially enormous, red ball glaring at us through the dense haze of cloud at the horizon; so dense is the haze that I can stare directly at the setting sun’s enormous clock face without shielding my eyes at all. It’s a remarkable color, neither red nor yet orange, not fuchsia or pink. Rather like the most vivid and rich color on the top of a ripe summer peach where it shades from orange over to red near the stem, only far deeper and nearly fluorescent. The thick haze that veils the sun and yields this color is quite flat and undifferentiated, except a wispy strand like a dark birthmark reaching into the orb at 7 o’clock.
…can someone explain why a place with enough of its own ancient history to fill a library would tart itself up like an outpost of Baja California? The tourists weren’t buying it, either…
Back in the office last week I paused to look over the old, fading color photos taped to the gunmetal-grey doors of the cluttered IT equipment cabinet. In one photo four white MSF Mahindra 4×4’s are parked elegantly by the side of a flat, paved, unpotholed, divided, four-lane highway complete with paved shoulder. Asking where the photos was – since it couldn’t be Manipur, which has no divided roads or highways aside from a few blocks in Imphal – I learned it was when our four new vehicles drove overland from mainland India to reach our project a few years back. So all these rhapsodies about the sun, the palm trees, and the apparent – to my mind – similarities to Sri Lanka (meaning: this place looks and feels more like that than anything else I’ve seen before; certainly more than the brush-covered tribal hills of Manipur) happen at the same time as my mind tries to calculate how much wealthier and more developed Kerala must be than Manipur. Howard & Gene rapidly tired of my rhapsodizing about the flat, smooth and wide roads of Rajasthan, last November. But here, not only are roads smooth and flat; they’re divided four lane highways! And most drivers stick to the two lanes per side, unlike Delhi where they’d squeeze a good four or five cars into the same width…plus a bus for good measure…
And billboard after billboard after billboard! I’m surprised to realize how rare billboards have become in my life. The entire 40km of road from airport to hotel tell me that Kochi seems to have more jewelers per capita than any place I’ve ever lived, including NYC. Kochi, according to one billboard, even seems to boast the world’s most popular jewelry store…though there’s no visible citation for that claim. Not since I shed responsibility for laying out the pages of Town & Country magazine have I seen such an assembly of jewelry advertisements in one place. I am clearly not in Manipur any more, and I feel rather like a bumpkin to be honest. After all, a place where a 5-year-old biking home from school last fall was murdered apparently for the small golden earrings normally worn by Meitei children & youths is unlikely to boast such ability to sell fine jewelry.
Little Things
Happy holidays, friends. Here in Lamka it’s a sunny and cold Christmas morning; fresh cinnamon rolls have popped out of the toaster oven now and I’m enjoying a quiet morning with tea and roll before the rest of the house awakes. Spread all around the table here in the living room are the spoils of my glorious christmas which will be happily shared with my colleagues. This embarrassment of riches – chocolate to last us all well into the new year, books to kick start MSF library into the new year and to occupy my free time easily until the end of this assigment, and DVD’s of BSG that’ll allow us all to huddle in front of the charcoal brazier by the TV on the coldest nights – is courtesy of the unstinting generosity of both Steves, Angela & of course Howard and Gene, whose early presents arrived with them for our November vacation. I could never thank you all enough, truly. What I offer, for now, are glimpses of the trails and hills, colleagues and villagers, that fill my life here. Happy holidays, and let’s get 2010 off to a promising start, shall we?
It’s dry season here in Lamka and they’re prepping some road beds for paving, or at least building up the gravel and dirt that cover some of the roads. Out for a run with Fiona I saw again one of my favorite neighborhood sights: a few 10-something kids dragging an obviously hand-made wooden cart (handmade wooden wheels and all — didn’t get a close enough look to see if there were metal axels but I suspect not) bumping by with jerry-cans of water sloshing around inside. (Interpretation: these folks are poor enough that they lug their own water, and poor enough that it’s better to build their own wheelbarrow rather than buy one commercially. Welcome to Lamka.) A couple days earlier, on another of our beloved weekend hill walks, I’d landed dramatically on my bum after jumping a ditch by a field where some kids were playing cricket. (Rare, that: first time I’ve seen cricket here, where the fields are about 99% given over to soccer usually; another indicator we’re culturally in southeast, more than south, Asia.) As though choreographed, the second I took my spill, every one of the kids burst out in uproarious laughter that was light-hearted and funny, not at all teasing or mean. They just found the sight of this bearded weird foreigner going down on his butt extremely amusing. The looks we get on our hikes tell us clearly enough that simply the idea of walking for fun is odd enough as it is — if one has the luxury of free time, one ought to use it to rest from one’s labors, not to take on new ones! Or at least to engage in some normal entertainment such as soccer! What’s with all this walking-through-the-hills business???
…above & below: now you know where those used clothes that you drop in bins end up: I assume they get sold to aggregators who then ship them out to a place like Lamka, where they fill many a shop.
Walking on (and taking one of these photos timed just to when the littlest of the kids was doing one of the dozens of cartwheels he did as I watched – a skill I suspect he’s learned only recently…), I commented to Fiona and Marja that this was a thing many Americans would not understand. These are folks many of whom live, literally, in wattle and daub huts (look closely at some of the photos and understand that these are typical, not unusual) crowded many to a room. These are folks who all walk a ways every morning, afternoon and evening to the nearest spigot and fill those large aluminum water carriers you see in a few of these pictures, for cooking cleaning & personal hygiene…and trust me when I say this water would not pass US FDA standards.
…those are the kids in question; click on the photo and you’ll see the cartwheeler more clearly.
These are folks who, if they have electricity at all, have it only during those rare and unpredictably intermittent hours when there’s actually power coming over the city lines. I said to Marja and Fiona, ‘I’m not sure that most Americans understand, or believe, that it’s possible to be so simply and gleefully happy when one lives in this kind of setting with so few of the comforts and luxuries that we take for granted.’ Part of me thought it was hyperbole on my part, but I really wonder. When I consider the horror – truly! – with which so many of my friends from LA and elsewhere have greeted the concept even of just backpacking or camping, for a few days and a change of pace, in a place lacking a hair drier and streaming internet…well, I just really wonder whether these Americans would know how to locate and experience joy here. And that makes me sad. Again and again I hear friends from the US long for more connection to community, better links with family and the world around them. But again and again I see them go on shopping sprees and sit for hours in front of the TV or the computer instead of getting up, giving up the luxury, and getting out and about to meet and greet the world.
…I can never see a chicken strolling around without thinking of how Steve jumped out of the way in fear of bird flue, any time he saw one when he visited me in China four years ago…
Readers of this blog and friends who’ve corresponded with me lately know I’ve been tired – I’ve been working hard, it’s the cold season here in Lamka and with no indoor heating I do tend get a bit tired after a day huddled around a charcoal brazier. Perhaps I’ve not put out there quite enough of why I do this, all the things I do love not only about my work but about the opportunity to be reminded that the luxury I know awaits me back in the US is not necessary — it’s pleasant, it’s luxurious, but it can also be a trap. I plan to spend most of 2010 enjoying my family and friends back home, enjoying the lovely home I helped my Mom make for herself this year.
Just about this time a decade ago, as 1999 waned to 2000 and those in the know insisted that the new milennium didn’t really begin until 2001, I was at the peak of my last career, in publishing. I’d owned my lovely new house in Long Beach for a mere seven months and my mother came to celebrate the turn of the year and my first Christmas at my new home. Through those sunny southern California holidays, builders were tiling and redoing the pool behind my house, installing solar paneling to keep the pool warm on those cool coastal California summer evenings, the house had bee nicely earthquake retrofitted…and I wondered how I’d make good my escape from that life. Much as I enjoyed – and truly I did – the wine & cheese evening I had with my mom and some friends to celebrate the new year, proud as I was of the turtle and fish tiles I’d chosen to decorate the newly refinished pool (and truly I was), I just saw publishing in an unstoppable decline and frankly knew I’d learned what I needed from the career anyway and was ready for work that would do as much to connect me to world as to fill my bank account. But I had, of course, no idea how to make the shift from well-paid corporate executive to under-paid humanitarian worker. What the US likes to call the ‘non-profit’ sector tends, there at least, to frown upon those with business backgrounds on the assumption that we can’t make the transition well from a cash bottom line to a social or humanitarian bottom line…or from a larger paycheck to a much smaller one. I think if more American were willing to reaxmine their goals and hopes, it could happen. I’m certainly happy it’s happened for me, and I look forward to connecting with all of you again on an extended down time in the US in 2010. Happy holidays & new year, everyone!
…if you’ve googled Manipur, you’ve read about Loktak Lake. Le voila, above and below.
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Above & below: watching the friendly football (soccer) match between MSF and Shalom, the local community care center that we work closely with…and village scenes around the soccer field or football pitch.
…Above: one of my favorite kids (an AIDS orphan) at the local NGO that houses patients who’ve come to town for ART treatment, many from Myanmar; and below, the pre-wedding send-off ceremony for a colleague.
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Udaipur: Palaces by the Lake
smw, slt has taken a break from work in Manipur to visit several of India’s justly famous tourist towns and monuments on an extended vacation to Rajasthan and the Uttar Pradesh cities of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, which with Delhi served as capitals for the six Mughal emperors. Being out and about in this enormous country with its vast and rich history and cultural variety has humbled me with reminders of … well, how much world there really is and how little time one has to appreciate it. You’ll see how captivated I was by the landscapes, the monuments and the people we’ve seen as we traveled around; and you’ll read (if you choose) how I’ve been reminded of earlier trips through another great Asian nation with rich culture and history. Right now I’m feeling small and grateful for the chance see and share some of this – reminded of my grandmother’s trip to India and how flabbergasted she was by the Taj herself, back in the late 1970s. And still a bit boggled that I myself have had such an opportunity of which I only dreamed back when I was skipping stones with my brothers on Seven-Mile Creek during the long summer vacations. Ah well, as you may also read, my aging bones and brain are also feeling a bit tired and wonder how soon I’ll decide to retire and drop my passport into a drawer to be forgotten for a couple decades. Time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime I do hope you’ll enjoy the photos and forgive me their great abundance. 
…Udaipur, among those familiar with Indian history, is probably best known as the last holdout of the Rajputs against both the Mughals and the British. After losing their original home fort at Chittor a few too many times to invading Mughals, Udai heard a voice in the desert – well, some sort of prophetic voice – that told him he and his people would be safe if he built them a fort and a palace here. So he did, and as best I can read the history, this holdout of Rajput strength never fell to the Mughals. (Surprisingly difficult to track one’s way through the various historical summaries in different travel guides, and I admit I’ve not gone back and read an Indian history book since, well, since Reagan was president.
built about handful of palaces in what is now the absolutely sprawling City Palace compound. Feeling those half-dozen palaces weren’t quite enough, they built another two out in the middle of the manmade lake they’d created — the most famous being the white Lake Palace, now the exclusivest of exclusive hotels (Udai’s descendants now operate a couple dozen hotels out of various of their palaces, while living themselves in one or two of the others), which featured quite prominently in the rather enchantingly named James Bond film Octopussy.
In any case, one or two of these palaces are now given over to the City Palace Museum, recounting the history of the Mewar Dynasty (Udai and his children). The artistic centerpiece is he Peacock Court, featuring three absolutely spectactular tile peacocks. Classic example of the beauty that can emerge from dreadully inequal social systems…I just hope the remarkable artists who created these got a reasonable day’s wage for doing so.
One thing that moderately confused me but also confirmed my inner-feminist’s suspicion that misogyny is universal, regardless of one’s religion or philosophical underpinnings: the Rajputs, Hindu believers who proudly resisted Mughal influence, adopted with great alacrity the purdah system of hiding ‘their’ women away from the outside world, behind zenana screens in the women’s quarters. Lots of commentaries on how the purdah screens were so set up as to make it very possible for women to observe the happenings in court from behind the screen while being well protected from roving eyes themselves. Whatever. The screens can be quite lovely, gotta admit.
…what DID we do for dinner plans before they littered the landscape with mobile phone towers?
…two MSFers talking about generator schedules, even on their vacation. Sad but true.
They call Udaipur the most romantic city in India, I think; I can’t comment on that, but it’s certainly got interesting twisty streets and lovely buildings aplenty, wound around the lakes and hills. The alleyway and house-painting below were jokingly referred to by Howard as the most-photographed alley in Udaipur, since I was far from the only tourist taking a photo.
We stayed in the ‘Royal Retreat’ at Shikarbadi (one of the few dozen above-mentioned former palaces plus a hunting lodge, aka Shikarbadi Hotel, or two) for the glorious four days in Udaipur. H&G took great pleasure in getting out and about for more temples and sites; I took great pleasure in the hills, wetlands, deer and birds while being a vegetable in the hotel room and grounds. Having been influenced by a Frank Zappa fan in my youth (that’s you, Jens), I couldn’t help thinking of it as the Sheikh Yerbouti hotel. Hehe.
…since Shikarbadi is well south of the city, tucked into the hills below the lake, they seem to do special breakfasts for tour groups to give tourists an idea of the royal lifestyle with hunting lodges in the hills, and…well, literally, the red-carpet treatment. The low-slung building by the slough, above, contained our room and had a deer park on the other side from the slough.
(so much world, so little time....) 
