Koraput Hilary

The end of an era

2010-05-04T20:22:00.000+05:30

I've only been home for a couple of days and it feels very strange. Everything is very familiar but also very alien and I no longer feel like some sort of celebrity that has to be greeted every time I walk down the street.

I haven't done very much yet, complete exhaustion hitting me as soon as I got to the safety of home. On my first morning I went for a walk to try to get a bit of exercise after spending far too much time sitting around on trains, in planes or just waiting for things to happen. Apart from feeling very cold after the extreme heat of Delhi and grappling with the discomfort of wearing walking boots after 9 months of wearing only flip flops on my feet, it was lovely. There were vivid splashes of colour with bluebells, primroses, cowslips and apple trees among the bright greens of an English spring and the sky was a bright blue with wispy clouds and a morning moon showing.

A friend I made in India asked me what I missed and what I was looking forward to experiencing again when I returned home. What I really missed was my family and friends of course but now I'm home I'm realising how many other things I missed as well. The huge choice of products available in the market and shops is bewildering and it's hard to choose what to buy. The cleanliness of both towns and countryside, litter not being a problem here. The constant supply of electricity. Knowing that it's safe to drink water that's come straight from the tap. Broadband!

Yesterday I had a lovely lunch of French bread with 4 different sorts of locally made cheese (delicious) and dinner of roast pork (again, locally produced) with proper crackling, roast potatoes and parsnips freshly dug from my garden that afternoon, wilted spinach and steamed calabrese. Today I had a bacon sandwich for breakfast, fresh, local asparagus for lunch and dinner will be a salad of fresh, mixed leaves, local tomatoes and cold meat. Yes, I've missed the variety of foods we can get here and am relishing the different flavours and textures.

It seems strangely quiet here. I have not heard a single horn since I left Delhi. There are a few dog barks but not the howling that the feral dogs of India use to communicate with each other in the evenings. I drove today for the first time since my return. I had felt a bit apprehensive about getting into the drivers seat again but it was less nerve-wracking than trying to cross roads in Delhi.

The thing that I am really not looking foward to is getting back to work. I don't yet know what I will be doing or where but the prospect of going back to work in the commercial world is not appealing and there are many other people looking for jobs as well so the competition for the good jobs is high. That will be my next big adventure. In the meantime, I will bring this blog to a close and say how much I will miss the friends I made out in India and the generosity of so many strangers. I hope to be back sometime soon!

It's cold!

2010-05-02T23:25:00.002+05:30

After all my waiting for flights to resume in Europe to get home I found another hurdle to my return home. I had finally managed to get a seat on a flight back home on Tuesday but when I tried to check in I came face to face with bureaucracy and was refused access through immigration and escorted out of the airport.

As required here in India, when I arrived in Koraput I had filled in forms and submitted photos and copies of passport and visa to register as a foreigner. Unfortunately, I did not follow through and challenge the assurance that all was completed and insist that I got a piece of paper confirming registration in my possession. Without that paper, I was not allowed to leave the country. Trapped! My fault of course for not continuously hassling colleagues to make sure that all the formalities were properly completed but this was all at a time when I was trying to get to grips with lots of new things - new job, new culture, new environment, new colleagues, new language etc and it just got forgotten about. Which was very unfortunate.

The only way that we could work out that I would be sure to resolve the problem was to return to Koraput to complete the process, paying the fine as penalty for late registration. We thought about trying to do the administration in Delhi but there was the risk that I'd be sent back to Orissa as the Delhi authorities would not have known what I had been doing in India. I also thought about doing the task remotely, sending my papers by courier but that would take 3-4 days in each direction with the associated risk that there would be more delays if there was any problem iwth the paperwork. So back to Koraput it was.

I decided to fly back as I couldn't face another 40 hours each way on the train. We managed to get a seat on a flight on Wednesday and had a mad dash to go to the market to get passport photos and recharge my phone with more credit then back to the hotel for rapid packing of bags, flinging the things I thought I'd need for a brief visit into a small pack and shoving everything else into my big bags for storage at the Programme Office until I returned. I couldn't find my Orissa SIM card which I'd put somewhere in the bottom of a bag, assuming that I wouldn't need it again in the foreseeable future but no matter, my contact back in Koraput knew my Delhi SIM card number.

I don't like airports. They are stressful places at the best of times and by now I was highly stressed and feeling a complete idiot but I was amused to see security stopping a man trying to take toy machine gun in his hand luggage. It made me start reading all the other things that aren't allowed - I knew about dynamite, knives, aerosols etc but cattle prods and throwing starplates? I guess a cattle prod could be pretty nasty but what is a throwing starplate? I decided that I was reassured to see that security is being taken seriously.

I settled down to the usual tedious wait for my flight and heard an announcement made about delay. The screen message showed that it would leave half hour later than scheduled. I started chatting to a friendly man who told me he came from Dehradun, surprised that I knew where it was but then thought that I heard my name over the tannoy. I stopped talking and of course the announcement was not repeated but spotted that the board was showing that my flight had been brought back forward to it's original departure time. At last, the message was repeated, stating that this was last announcement for boarding. Rapid exit to the departure gate needed but I made it on board.

I landed in Visakhapatnam sometime after 7pm. It was very easy for the taxi triver to find me at airport as I was the only white person there. We drove through terrible traffic out of Vizag, taking about 2 hours just to clear the city and stopped at around 10:30 for some food at a truckers' dhaba. I had a sneaking suspicion that I might have been the first white woman to have stopped there judging from the curious looks I got. I was surprised to see a large herd of water buffalo being driven along the road at around 1:00am, maybe it's safer herding them at that time of night when the roads are quieter. We arrived at my hotel at 1:30am but of course all the gates were padlocked and no-one answered the phone. The taxi driver shouted loudly and rattled the metal gates to get the attention of someone inside, probably waking up all the hotel guests and half the neighbourhood in the process. I hadn't used this hotel before although I'd been inside to attend a presentation. It's managed by the Koraput Sri Jagannath temple and has a very homely feel. It was very clean but I was a bit disconcerted to find a leech slithering around in my bathroom and that there was no towel. My clean pyjama trousers became a towel substitute.

In the morning, colleague A from my NGO came to see me and told me he had to go to a meeting out in the field but that I should wait at the hotel for colleague B to collect me. He also told that the NGO would pay the fine for late registration. I only had my Delhi SIM card with me which doesn't have contact details for many Koraput colleagues and foolishly I didn't think to ask for the phone number for colleague B in case of any problems. Meanwhile, colleague B was at the office, having been told to wait for me to go there. He had tried to call me but only had the number for my Orissa phone which of course was switched off and back in Delhi.

After a couple of hours of waiting and trying to stay calm and patient I tried to call colleague A but his phone had no network coverage out in the field. I tried phoning colleague D who I knew was at the same meeting but his phone wouldn't work either. I sent a message home and asked Jon to hack into my mailbox and send a mail to colleague B giving him the right phone number and asking him to call me ASAP which he duly did and I managed to get to talk to said colleague and arrange for my collection from the hotel. When we arrived at the NGO office I was surprised to be asked for the money to pay the late registration fine but fortunately had sufficient cash in my bag to pay the fee.

Off I went with colleague C to the office of the Superintendant of Police to lodge the paperwork, only to be told to return at 7:00pm the same day. I had a rather fretful afternoon, worrying about the situation waiting for 7pm to arrive. In the evening, I was told that when the registration was completed I then had to apply for permission to leave the country, sending my stress levels shooting up again and we were told to return the next morning. By this time I was too wound up to sleep much and returned to the SP office the next day to be greeted by a 'very important' looking man who came outside laughing and said I was lucky he was on duty as it was all sorted out. Which fortunately it was and I finally managed to get my registration documents and permission to leave India.

The next hurdle was returning to Delhi and getting a flight back to the UK. I tried to send SMS messages and make a couple of calls only to find that my phone had no network coverage and was told that there was a big network problem that day. Meanwhile, colleague A had gone to a travel agent with most of my remaining cash and some of his own to buy a ticket for me to return to Delhi. The agent was supposed to bring me the ticket at the hotel. I waited for the 15 minutes I was promised, then another 15 minutes and then some more before asking the hotel to take collection of the ticket when it arrived as I needed to contact people in Delhi and home. So off I went to a cyber cafe, only to find that there was a power cut to add to the problems. Fortunately it had an an inverter so I was able to get onto the internet and sent emails to people who needed to know about the success. It's hard to hold proper conversations via email but it's better than nothing. I then needed to photocopy my registration documents but the lack of electricity stopped that.

While I was sat in the cyber cafe I overheard the teenager in charge of the place struggling to say my name and writing it out on a piece of paper. Confused, I indicated that this was me that he was talking about but his lack of English and my poor Oriya made it difficult to understand what was happening. I decided that maybe this was the travel agent that had been asked to get me a ticket to fly to Delhi but then was further surprised to see colleague C walking into the cyber cafe with a wad of cash. He explained that the reservation that the first travel agent had made had gone wrong and been cancelled so they'd asked the people in the cyber cafe (which also doubles up as a travel agent) to get me a ticket. They made a reservation but nothing could be printed as the power was still out. Stress levels at boiling point by now.

I asked colleague C if he could give me a lift to an ATM to get more cash to pay the balance for my flight and the taxi fare and then on to the NGO office which still had power to make my photocopies. He very kindly helped me to sort everything out and returned to the cyber cafe/travel agent to pick up the tickets later that afternoon.

Later in the afternoon I was invited to go round to the homes of colleagues A, C and D. First house was colleague D where I met his wife and son and was shown round before being fed sweets, chai and juice. I was taken to meet his neighbours then we moved onto the home of colleague C. I was welcomed in to meet his 2 daughters, niece, wife and mother and was given fruit, sweets and juice before being taken outside to meet some of his neighbours and other relatives. Last social visit for the day was to the house of colleague A to meet his wife and son for bhaji, more sweets and juice. It was all very kind and touching to be greeted like a long-lost friend and I couldn't help feeling sad that I hadn't had similar invitations while I was still working and living in Koraput. I might have felt less isolated.

Feeling full of very sweet food and drink I got back to the hotel and packed my bag ready for a 5:30am start the next day. I had worried about waking the staff up at this time but it was not a problem at all. This hotel, being attached to the temple opens up very early and I saw more people in reception at 5:30am than I had on the previous trips through. I was able to enjoy the journey back to Vizag this time, feeling more relaxed after completing the administration and travelling in daylight. The driver had brought his wife and 2 sons with him and they all sat in the back seat while I took the front passenger seat. They were very friendly and well behaved and despite a minor vomiting incident in the back and slight concern when I saw a lorry skidding sideways along the road towards us after braking on the rough surface I enjoyed the drive. The road twists and turns through spectacular hills, part of the Eastern ghats. We spotted a snake slithering over the road, dozens of cattle, water buffalo and goats being taken to market on foot or lurching around on the back of open trucks or squashed into autos.

The roads in Orissa are really bad, potholes and rough stony surfaces and little more than rough tracks in places, limiting speed to around 20km p/h some of the way (and this is a national inter-state highway). There are frequently large rocks littering the road and wrecks of lorries that didn't make the steep hills and hairpin bends litter roadside. Some stretches of the road are being rebuilt and there were piles of rocks along some stretches with people wielding hammers breaking them down into smaller pieces for hardcore which looked really hard work.

We stopped for breakfast at another dhaba in Vizniagaram where I had iddli and chai. Back in the car I was given a banana and a sweet fizzy drink as I was their guest before being dropped safely at the airport to catch my flight. Unfortunately, I had selected a flight that required me to change to a different flight en route (much much cheaper than a direct flight) and I had a 4 hour stopover in Hyderabad. However, I made it back to Delhi, arrived at a hotel near the airport and was reunited with my big bags that had been secured in the office in Delhi. I sunk down with a cup of tea at about 10pm then reorganised my luggage yet again before retiring to bed in an effort to get some sleep before getting up to leave for the airport at 5am the next day.

This time I got through immigration successfully and had a comfortable and punctual flight back home. Looking down at the land below the plane as we came into land I was struck at how green everything looked, a really vivid green after the dry Indian countryside. Getting off the plane my first reaction was how cold and wet it was but I guess that's to be expected, coming home to England after 9 months in India. It's around 4164 miles/6701 km from Delhi to London then another 110 miles/1609 km back to my home. That journey took 15 hours including the 3 hours hanging around Delhi airport, about the same time as it took me to get from Koraput to Delhi.

I will bring this blog to a close soon now that I am no longer in Koraput. However, over the next couple of days I will take my camera out with me to try to capture the things that surprise or delight me on my return home for my final post.

I'm still waiting

2010-04-20T14:13:00.001+05:30

I have always said I'd love to go and see an active volcano, all the photos and films that I have seen make them look exciting if terrifying. However, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland is one volcano that I wish would just put the lid back on and stop belching out ash. The European airspace has started to open up a little today but the renewed volcanic activity may bring it all grinding back to a halt. It is very frustrating, after reaching that difficult decision to end my placement early as I'd completed most of the tasks that I set out to achieve and had little prospect of being able to make further progress in the immediate future, I now just want to be back home with my family and friends.

We had a bit of excitement in the apartment yesterday evening. I returned back from my daily wanderings of Delhi and noticed a strong, pungent and unpleasant smell filling the main living-room and dining area. Assuming it was some cleaning product I just walked through quickly to my room and proceeded to fling down my bag and boot up my computer to check the state of the airspace before going for a shower. This was followed up by a strange man flinging open my bedroom door and telling me to get out quickly. It seemed that there had been a release of battery acid following a reaction with water and gases had filled the apartment. We traipsed round to another apartment while poor Junior leaned over a drain retching and coughing as he'd had a face full of the gas, emitting from the back-up electricity supply battery that kicks in during the many power cuts. Fortunately he had not suffered any serious injury and seemed fine after a good night's sleep.

Delhi is really hot. I have a thermometer that I've been using to monitor the temperature while here in India. On Sunday, I went out to do some sightseeing and took the thermometer for a ride with me. It measured a maximum of 51.4c (that's 129.38f for my American friends). No wonder I was thirsty. However, despite the blazing sun, I had a really interesting visit to Mehrauli, a district not far from Vasant Kunj where I am currently based in south Delhi. Mehrauli is one of the 7 ancient cities that make up the state of Delhi. There are some fascinating archaeological remains there which deserved more than the few hours that I stayed out in the sun to explore properly
Mehrauli

One of Delhi's great monuments is the Qutb Minar, at over 72m high the world's tallest free-standing minaret. The minaret was built on the site of Lal Kot, the red citadel of the city of Dhillika, the capital of the last Hindu rulers of Delhi. Materials from that ruin was used to build this tower with it's red sandstone and carvings of verses from the Qur'an.

The minaret was built as a victory tower, celebrating the end of the Hindu kingdoms of northen India and the start of muslim rule. It is one of the earliest examples of Indo-Islamic architecture and building was started in 1193 by the first muslim ruler of India Qutb-ud-din Aibak and completed nearly 200 years later in 1386.

It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and I was fortunate enough to have visited on World Heritage Day when entrance was free.

There are many other interesting ruins in the Qutb Complex, including the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque. This was built around the same time as the minaret was started and the first mosque built in Delhi after the Islamic conquest of India.

In the surrounding archaeological park of Mehrauli there are more stepwells, similar to the one I had visited a few days earlier near to Connaught Place. They are all dry now but used to fill during monsoon season, providing a water supply and a place of leisure, people finding shade under the arches and swimming in the water. Rajon ki Baoli is the bigger of the two wells that I found, very wide and spacious and an impressive piece of architecture. Gangdak ki Baoli, situated down a narrow lane in Mehrauli is much deeper comprising 5 tiers, each narrowing as you move towards the base. Shame the wells were dry, I'd have loved to go for a swim to try to cool down a little.

I had only got part of the way round my planned walk of the park when I realised that I had nearly run out of water. This was not a good position to be in with the sun reaching it's zenith. An Indian man started to talk to me about the Rajon ki Baoli, next to where we were standing. I asked him where the closest bottled water seller was and he kindly ran off with 15 of my rupees, returning 5 minutes later with a bottle of chilled, clean water. There are some lovely people around in India. He carried on telling me about the area and walked with me to find a couple more of the ruins that I was interested in seeing. I would never have found the second stepwell without his assistance.

He also took me to a spectacular Jain temple, the Jain Mandir Dadabar, a glittering marble, coloured glass and mirrored confection. It was amazing but I had to keep my sunglasses on all the way round, even under cover because of the glare from the bright materials. The hard thing about this visit was removing my shoes before I entered the sanctum. The ground was burning hot so I had to run across the tarmac, concrete and baked marble as quickly as I could to escape the burning sensation on the soles of my feet.

The best thing about still being in Delhi is that it is now mango season. Bring them on!

Trying times

2010-04-17T09:33:00.000+05:30

I arrived in Delhi 4 days ago. Stepping off the air-conditiioned train felt like walking into an oven and reminded me how much milder the climate is in Koraput. A porter grabbed my bags on the train and proceeded to try to charge me 150 rupees for the privelage of carrying them about 20 steps across the platform. The going rate is 30 rupees. I declined to pay him such an exorbitant amount, much to his disgust. I guess this is the price I had to pay for travelling on 1-AC, the only berths available for several days, marking me out as a 'rich' westerner with lots of money to spare.

VSO have housed me in an apartment in Vasant Kunj, sharing with 4 young women staying in Delhi to attend a training course. They are very nice and friendly but it feels very odd to be sharing with people after so long living alone and is taking some getting used to. The apartment is kept spotlessly clean by the 'boy', Junior, who has also been bringing me food from a nearby canteen. Lots of food. Too much food. Junior does not speak English and I do not speak Hindi but we seem to be managing. However, after a long time of looking after myself, both here in India and my other life in the UK (it is after all, many years since I left my parental home!) I'm finding it strange to have someone waiting on me in my home, even if it is only a temporary home.

I met up with the VSO India country director to talk about my placement in Koraput and discuss what other volunteer options might be available to me. I had been very tempted with one that I'd already heard about in Bolangir, back in Orissa but having travelled for 40 hours on trains to get from Orissa to Delhi I didn't feel much like reversing the journey to get back to close to where I'd started. We also explored opportunities here in Delhi but just a few hours in this city was enough to make me realise that I could not stay here for long. It is vibrant, there is lots to do and interesting things to see but it is also busy, noisy, dirty and above all at the moment, very very hot. Most of India is hot at this time of year and will of course get hotter and more uncomfortable coming up to the monsoon season as the humidity rises but at least Koraput has the advantage of being in the hills, making it a little cooler. I have therefore decided to go home to the UK, hopefully being able to continue to provide a little support to SPREAD remotely.

Which has brought me to the next problem. Volcanic ash. All airports in the UK have been closed and at the time of writing this, I have no idea when they will reopen. This is of course very frustrating as I can't plan what to do with my time. I could have a flight in 3 days time, on the other hand could have to wait another 2 weeks UK flights grounded. Vasant Kunj is on the edge of the city, close to the airport (handy for when I do eventually get to fly) but a long way from most of the places of interest in Delhi and costly in taxis or autos. Maybe I should just give up waiting around and travel up into the north for a week and hope that the dust has settled next weekend?

In the meantime, I managed to go out with my friend M to see the stepwell in the middle of Delhi, Agresen ki Baoli. I had never heard of stepwells before and this one in Delhi is not mentioned in any of the guidebooks I've read but the one I visited is a fascinating place. They seem to have served a dual purpose, both storing and supplying water and for leisure, providing some shade from the blistering heat of the Indian sun Stepwells. There are more in Delhi which hopefully I will be able to visit while I'm here but first I will have to go and find somewhere to buy a new brolly to replace the one that I left in an auto. No rain at the moment but they are great for keeping the heat of the sun off your head.

After exploring the well and admiring the very noisy bats hanging from the roof and pigeons in the recesses, I decided that I would treat myself to a good lunch. Koraput is lovely - clean air, friendly, relatively quiet and with a good supply of fresh vegetables but there is nowhere for us westerners to go and indulge ourselves with the sort of treat that we might occasionally have at home.

We walked round to the Imperial Hotel for a bit of luxury in one of the restaurants there but were not impressed by the service. A waiter came to see us soon after we arrived, bringing us menus. We immediately asked him to bring us a bottle of mineral water as we were very thirsty after being out in the midday sun. Half an hour later we were still waiting. M went to see one of the other waiters to repeat the order for water and give our food order. We continued waiting. After another 10 minutes we decided we'd had enough and stomped out and went into another part of the hotel. A very nice young woman in the bakery section asked if she could help and when we explained the problem, told us to sit down and she'd make sure we were looked after. True to her promise, she did and we were brought our water which we proceeded to drink very quickly before we indulged in very nice quiche and fruit smoothies.

I then decided that I'd buy myself a couple of snacks from the bakery (such produce not being available in Koraput) to take back to my apartment for supper as I'd already had a good meal at lunch and wouldn't need much more food. I chose a Danish pastry, apple tart but declined to purchase a hot cross bun when I found out how much they cost. However, one of these buns was slipped into my box without charge, maybe as an apology for having to wait. The pastries were lovely and such a treat after so long without such delights. The only trouble was that Junior proceeded to bring me a dinner of mutter paneer, some other sort of curry, vegetables, rice and roti as well. There can be problems when you don't speak each other's languages.

I've been trying to rationalise my luggage, deciding what I really want to take with me and what to leave behind to reduce my load when I eventually manage to get on board a plane headed for home. I got a bit worried when I saw that the zip was tearing away from the body of my case and decided I either needed to find some strong sticky tape to strap it all together and hope it would survive baggage handling or go out to buy a new case. I had decided on the latter as luggage is probably much cheaper here in India than in the UK but then one of my flat-mates told me that Junior could get it mended for me. And he did. He marched off with my empty, split case and a 100 rupee note to a nearby cobbler and returned half an hour later with a case as good as new (well, almost) and 60 rupees change. India seems to be very good at fixing things, not like our throwaway society in Europe and North America. I now have to get everything repacked.

The auto drivers seem to have problems finding their way round Vasant Kunj. To my outsider's eye it looks very anonymous with few easily identifiable landmarks. I am not sure that there is much logic to the block numbering system either. You might think that Block C would be next to Block B or that Sector 3 next to Sector 4 but I'm not convinced this is the case here. The drivers I've used so far keep stopping, leaping out to ask for directions, driving a few more metres then stopping again, looking just as confused as I feel. My journey last night had the added interest of being driven several hundred metres along the wrong side of a dual carriageway to get to a filling station. I guess that was the shortest routes but I am a coward when being driven into queues of fast moving traffic going the opposite way to us. After refilling with gas we proceeded (in the right direction this time, thankfully) and meandered along for another half hour, looking for the apartments. However, we got back safely and parted with smiles.

Moving on

2010-04-13T19:18:00.000+05:30

I was invited to join in the first birthday celebrations of the youngest son of one of my NGO colleagues. This was the second time that I had been to the Jagannath Temple in Koraput for a birthday party and the kids seem to find it a great place to race around chasing each other in the safety of the temple compound. The culture requires that you remove your shoes to enter temples here which I dutifully did. The trouble was, in the heat of the midday sun, the marble steps were foot-blisteringly hot so I had to race up the long flight of steep steps extra quick to try to keep my feet on the ground for the minimum possible time but the soles of my feet were still sore from the hot stone. It was a relief to get into the shade and cool of the stone floors sheltered and the burnt skin is still peeling off my feet a week later.

After much soul-searching and discussion, I made the decision a couple of weeks ago to leave Koraput and travel on to different things. I've been working hard since I arrived last August and managed to complete some challenging pieces of work but I decided that it was the right time for me to move on. It was very odd saying goodbye to everyone and sad that I didn't see everyone I'd hoped for but as I hate saying goodbye anyway, I was glad that my departure was not too prolonged.

I spent a few days going through everything in my house, working out what to take with me, what to give to someone else or the next volunteer in the house and what to simply throw out. The ants and weevils decided for me in some cases and several items of foodstuff had to be discarded after serious infestation. I could not work out how ants had managed to invade a brand new box of cornflakes, still heat-sealed and seeming still to be airtight. It's not a pretty sight, pouring out breakfast at the start of the day and finding hundreds of ants swarming over it. The cows seemed to enjoy the flakes, ants and all.

My last couple of days in Koraput had the added entertainment of the Brahmin family who lived in the house opposite to mine celebrating the coming of age of the teenage son Hindu Initiation. This is an important ritual for Brahmin boys, signifying a new stage in life but as with most ceremonies in India, it meant lots of noise with conch shells being blown loudly from very early in the morning until late at night (I think I heard the first one of the day at 5am), combined with music coming from horns, drums and loudspeakers. There were many visitors to the house, probably the whole extended family, all dressed in their finest with the women in gloriously coloured and embroidered saris, some of the men wearing all white khurta and salwar and the boy wearing red with an elaborate head dress. I was a little worried as the road was blocked by the festivities for several hours and my train was due in later in the afternoon but fortunately, it reached a conclusion shortly before my friends arrived with the vehicle to take me to the station. My friend Sheila who had come from nearby and hotter Rayagada for a couple of days rest and recuperation and relative coolness hadn't bargained on the early morning horn alarms. My departure was accompanied by shouted 'bye byes' from the colourfully dressed kids who had joined in the celebrations.

I was given a lift to the station in Koraput which was a relief, it's no fun trying to negotiate a reasonable price with the auto drivers when they see a white woman streaming with sweat, struggling under the weight of large heavy bags. I was very touched to be given some parting gifts, including a bunch of pretty flowers which accompanied me on my travels on the overnight train to Bhubaneswar, sat in the water bottle holder before coming to spend a day and a night with me in a hotel while waiting for my next train. But why does a hotel, advertising it's room rates as including a one-way journey to or from the station or airport then turn round and say that it's only a pick-up service, not drop off? I had decided that I'd find my own transport from the station to the hotel then make use of the hotel service to take me back to the station for the morning train. The irritating thing is that when I talked to the receptionist on arrival to check that they would arrange the morning journey without additional charge, I was told yes. I've begun to think that yes may be the standard response when they don't really understand what you are saying and so just say yes, to try to keep you happy. I really should have tried harder at my Oriya lessons.

However, I found a nice cycle-rickshaw wallah to take me from station to hotel at a very reasonable price and carried my heaviest bag on his head before struggling to cycle up the slope from the station with a heavy load. In the morning, I staggered back to the main road carrying my bags in the morning to find an auto driver to take pity on me. I seemed to cause much amusement with my heavy bags - big rucksack on my back, small rucksack on my front and small (heavy) case on wheels. I had to help the driver lift the big rucksack into his auto before being driven to the station and getting on board the luxury of the air-conditioned Rajdhani Express on my way to Delhi, a mere 25 hours and more than 1800 kilometres away. At least I have the privelage of sitting in air-conditioned luxury. The only berths available for several days were 1AC, the first class air-conditioned coaches which are much more costly than the others but a very nice treat. I should add that the extra cost of this luxury will not be borne by VSO but were paid for by my lovely husband who helped me out with booking tickets online when my internet connection wouldn't work.

Another couple of my epics

2010-04-02T14:38:00.001+05:30

I was away from my home in Koraput for 3 weeks and I'd left my PC behind, not wanting to carry it around with me while negotiating the 14.5 hour train ride, buses, autos, airports and taxis. While I was away my modem subscription expired. I have a modem plan where I pay a monthly subscription for unlimited access to the internet but felt there was little need to renew my access while several hundred miles away from my computer. The day of my return I sent an SMS message to R, the supplier of my modem, hoping that he'd keep his promise to renew it whenever I asked and I'd pay him later (actually, I sent it 3 times to the 3 different numbers I have for him). I got back home to Koraput in the middle of the night but wide awake after a long journey so I quickly logged on to check my mail and update my virus checker while I removed the dead cockroach wedged in the drain of my sink and scraped off the thick layer of red dust that had accumulated over everything in my absence.

The next day (Sunday) I was slightly concerned to see a couple of messages come through on the modem indicating that I'd downloaded from the internet and owed 13.2 rupees which had not been charged due to less balance. This was my first warning that the subscription had not been renewed. I braved the Orissi heat and walked to the market to R's store to pay him the cost of the month's subscription. R said he hadn't received my SMS, meaning I'd used my modem without the unlimited access that I thought I had in place. I told him I'd used it yesterday and handed over my money and believed the promise that the modem would be recharged with my subscription later that day as they couldn't access the internet at that time from that store. I kept checking my modem and laptop all day but in vain.

Monday: still no recharge confirmation message so I called R and asked for the renewal to be completed ASAP as I really needed my access restored. He promised it would be done within an hour. I waited an hour, checked, checked again and eventually called him again after about 2 hours. "Yes, yes, it will go through soon" he promised. I waited another couple of hours and called again. "It hasn't gone through yet? I'll just check to see what's happened and call you back within an hour". Guess what? No recharge message and no phone call. Feeling myself getting somewhat agitated and wanting to avoid swearing at someone over the pbone messages I sent SMS messages to the 3 contact numbers I have for R.

Tuesday: My modem was still not working. I was in the office and managed to make use of the office internet connection for a couple of hours until that also stopped working, probably due to one of the many power cuts that plague us here in Orissa. I went home feeling my stress levels rising and called R. Someone else answered his phone and promised to look into it and get back to me within an hour. So I waited. No phone calls were received. More SMS messages sent expressing my displeasure and I gave up for the day.

Wednesday: ditto much of the above except that today I got a recharge confirmation message on my modem. However, it still refused to work. A phone call to R who promised to find out what was happening and get back to me within an hour. Several hours later I gave up and went to bed, grumbling.

Thursday: I walked through the blazing midday heat to R's store carrying my laptop and modem. There were some really important emails that I should have sent earlier in the week and I was getting increasingly stressed by the delays and false promises. My visit was been preceded by SMS messages to the 3 phone numbers I have for R to let him know I was on my way. Could this have been a cue for R to hide? R was not in the store but there were 3 other people I'd seen working in there in the past, 2 young women that I know who had come into the shop with me _ another 3 random Koraputians, including a small boy who kept whacking my leg. As soon as the young woman member of staff saw me she picked up the phone and spoke to someone in extremely fast Oriya but I did catch the my name amongst the rest of the words. She thrust the phone into my hands and said "R. You speak". So I did and was promised again that it would be dealt with and my modem recharged. I handed the phone back to the young woman.

Meanwhile, one of the of the other staff in the shop was on a different phone, apparently talking to customer care. I caught enough of his conversation to know that the supplier was claiming I owed them money which did not surprise me as I'd use the modem without before recharge had gone through. The man told me that I owed them 450 rupees, I little excessive I thought as the messages I'd received suggested I owed just 13.2 rupees. I asked what I needed to do to get it fixed but just got blank looks. The young woman assistant asked me for my modem to test it in her PC. Not surprisingly, she told me it wasn't working. I asked what I needed to do to get the service restored but again, just got blank looks except that this time, everyone in the shop started laughing, not doing much to restore my temper. I shouted at the 2 young women who had accompanied me on my errand that I was glad that they found it funny because I didn't. Cue more laughter.

I stood up, demanded my modem back and stormed out of the store, followed closely by my 2 friends nervously asking me what the matter was. By this time I was on the point of bursting into tears with anger, frustration, irritation and rising panic about not getting out my emails which needed to be sent from my laptop as there were files on my PC that needed to be attached. I tried to explain that access to the internet is something that is really important to me while out in rural India, this being my primary means of communicating with my friends and family back home as well as the only way I have to get messages out when the phone just isn't enough. We walked round to R's other outlet, a tiny little shop selling crisps, sweets, tobacco and phone/modem recharges. R wasn't there but I was relieved to see K, R's brother. K has always been helpful to me in the past and speaks quite good English. He'd clearly been forewarned of my arrival and did his best to calm me down, promising me he'd get it sorted out within an hour and that he'd call me to let me know.

On Wednesday evening I had visited B, a young woman who lives nearby. B has been learning English and has always been friendly, trying to get to know a bit about my culture at the same time as practising her English. I asked her if she could help me with getting a couple of parcels sent back home to the UK. I knew that parcels have to be wrapped in cotton and stitched up before you could post them. I wasn't sure where to go to get the stitching done here in Koraput and as I wanted a bit of company as well, hoped she might accompany me and help explain what was needed. I explained what I needed to do and she said "you get cotton and stitch". I asked where to get the cotton, what tailor I could use to do the stitching and whether she'd come with me. She agreed and we decided to go out the next morning at 10. 10:15 I called at B's house. She was still having her morning bath. 10:40 we left and walked into the town. She asked me "you stitched the parcels?" Repeating my request for help I explained that no, no stitching done and I needed to get the cloth to do the wrapping. "you went to market last night to get cloth?". No, I needed to buy the cloth was my response.

We arrived at a cloth store and bought cloth for 40 rupees. We then went to a tailor and sat there for about 20 minutes while the parcels were stitched. Another 30 rupees. We went to the Post office and spoke to a man behind the counter. He told me they needed to be sealed with wax, something I should have remembered having posted things from India before but had completely forgotten and my previous attempts had used Post Offices where they supplied the wax and sealed the parcels for you (some readers may remember a previous visit I reported in http://community.vsointernational.org/blogs/hilaryjw/epics ). I found out from him where to get the wax and and asked whether he would put the wax on. Yes, was his response. I found the wax shop and returned with a stick of wax. The man in the PO then said very patiently that I needed to put the wax onto the seams. I took a deep breath, said OK and walked out again with B. B took me to her friend A's house who fortunately lived opposite the PO. A candle was lit and I proceeded to burn my fingers while smearing wax on the seams very inexpertly. Back to the PO for a long wait as a queue had materialised in my absence, getting irritated by 2 people who shoved in front of me and got served out of turn. Success at last, I managed to get my 2 parcels posted home. But will they arrive?

The Post Office visit was done just before my visit to R's store. Maybe not the best preparation for a frustrating and lengthy discussion with a group of very well-meaning Indian staff, wanting to help me but not having a great knowledge of English and not understanding half of what I said to them. I have had to learn to speak much more slowly and clearly here in India, realising that just as I can't understand Oriya when people speak at their normal speed, Indians can't understand English if I speak at my normal speed. I think that as my stress levels rose, my speech speeded up and they didn't understand anything I said and were worried because they thought I was angry with them.

My 2 young friends marched me off to the lassi seller and ordered us all a nice, cool lassi which helped to restore some life back into me before I visited the banana ladies to replenish my banana supply and then got an auto home. I can't cope with walking the mile uphill back home in heat of over 45c.

B asked me into her home and sat me down with a cup of cool water and tried to explain to me that the people in the shop were nervous of me because I was angry and they didn't understand what I was saying. My phone rang and it was K, asking me to check my modem. Hurrah - back online! I am now working on this modem at the giddy speed of a 2.4kbps. But at least it's working.

There is a moral to my story well explained by my friend Jen in her blog http://jeninorissa.blogspot.com/2010/04/25-things-to-do-while-in-india-aka.html

A few Darjeeling animals

2010-03-25T21:57:00.003+05:30

I put aside my prejudices about zoos to visit the zoological park in Darjeeling. I don't like seeing big animals caged up with little to do and getting stressed by visitors shouting at them but this zoo has some rare Himalayan species with captive breeding programmes for snow leopards, red pandas, Tibetan wolves and others and a couple of Bengal tigers that were rescued from circuses and it was really interesting. Darjeeling has a fair number of other animals wandering round including the inevitable street dogs and monkeys that seem to live happily alongside each other.

A great holiday but I have now left the cool of the Darjeeling hills to head back for the heat of Orissa. It will be hotter than ever. It will be good to get back to work to try to finish off as much as I can before leaving India at the end of my placement. I did after all come here to work, not to be a tourist.

A few days away from Koraput

2010-03-25T21:57:00.001+05:30

I'm very lucky to have been on a wonderful holiday in Darjeeling. It is a beautiful and fascinating place, a mix of Nepali, Indian, Tibetan, Gorkha, British and other cultures with Buddhist, Hindu and Christian followers. The town is spread across steep hillsides with clear evidence of it's colonial past and is surrounded by tea plantations. The gradient of the roads with their narrow, winding course must make things a bit tricky especially during monsoon or winter ice and snow. Porters carry huge loads up the hills, reaching places impossible for road vehicles. All sorts of ingenious solutions seem to be found to deal with the difficulties of getting big, heavy kit up the mountainside and I was particularly taken with the sight of a tractor-powered road roller. Although it is currently in the state of West Bengal it may not have much in common with cities like Kolkata. There has been a drive for the Darjeeling area, along with several other areas in this part of North East India to split away from the current political boundaries and become a separate state, Gorkhaland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorkhaland.

We had decided to treat ourselves to a really nice holiday in a good hotel as it was our 30th wedding anniversary. In the past, the majority our holidays have been camping or self-catering but this time we decided to treat ourselves. It was particularly luxurious for me after spending months in the rural town of Koraput which has limited choice of foods and for me, everything has to be done by hand. The luxury of showers with hot water, a laundry service and all our meals (including afternoon tea with scones and cream) was bliss. I stayed briefly in a hotel in Delhi last week which had a pair of scales in the bathroom. I knew I had lost a lot of weight during the first 3-4 months - or 'reduced' as one of my colleagues keeps telling me but hadn't weighed myself since I left the UK last July. I have put on a little weight in the last couple of months and I was surprised to find that I'm 12kg lighter than before I came to India but have been working hard on changing that by stuffing myself with excellent food on holiday and trying out lots of lovely Darjeeling teas.

The first few days in Darjeeling we were rewarded with clear days and good views of some of the Himalayan peaks. We got up early one morning to go to Tiger Hill to watch the sun rise and enjoyed the sight of the sunlight on Kanchenjunga turning the snow first to dark red, gradually turning brighter then gold before glowing white when the sun was fully risen. Great start to the day. I think we caught a glimpse of Everest but am not entirely sure.

The Himalayan Darjeeling Railway or Toy Train just had to be tried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darjeeling_Himalayan_Railway. We had great fun while the narrow guage steam train chugged it's way up impossibly steep gradients, causing chaos among the cars with road and track following the same route up the hills, criss-crossing each other numerous times. The track zigzags backwards and forwards and loops round to gain height and I got covered in soot while I leant out of the window taking photos. I could turn into a train nerd traveling on trains like that. Being in Darjeeling we did of course have to visit to a tea plantation, followed by a cup of what we were assured is the best tea in the world. It was very good tea.

A week in Puri

2010-03-16T15:24:00.001+05:30

All the VSO India volunteers + representatives from their partner NGOs were invited to attend an annual conference. The last time I joined a VSO conference I had to travel all the way to Delhi but this one was held in Puri in Orissa. The number of VSO volunteers placed in Orissa has increased significantly since I arrived here last year so it seemed a good state to choose to minimise the number of volunteers having to travel too far. We were lucky that the chosen venue was a very nice seaside town with interesting places to visit nearby but there were probably other constraints in that there had to be a hotel big enough to host 50 volunteers + 50 partners and appropriate conference facilities. Some of the volunteers may have felt that it was a long way to have to travel but at least I didn't have too long a journey this time.

It was really nice to have the opportunity to meet up with so many other people and find out more about what's happening in other parts of the country. Volunteers based in Delhi have the advantage of seeing colleagues who are passing through the city which is the home of VSO India Programme Office, they. The Delhi vols get to meet the new volunteers arriving and to say goodbye to the people leaving at the end of their placement but those of out in the more remote parts of India rarely see other volunteers so gatherings like that in Puri are really valuable to us, helping to remind us that we are not alone. Places like Koraput have little in the way of social life or other outsiders and apart from trying to get to know our neighbours with our limited ability to communicate in each other's languages and meeting up with any other colleagues nearby we don't have the same opportunities to meet other people. The conference went the way of most conferences, some bits inspiring and some less so but overall, it was a good week for me, giving me the chance to catch up with colleagues, meet some of the other NGOs and hear more about VSO India plans for the year.

Orissa is famous for its fish and seafood but Koraput is too far from the sea and too poor to get any of these delicacies so I made the most of the local catch while I was there as I love seafood along with other things hard to find in rural areas - muesli for example! Puri is a coastal resort with what looks like a lovely beach with waves rolling in from the Bay of Bengal. I got up early in the mornings to go for walks with my camera while the light was good and not too bright. The beach was full of people playing cricket and fishermen either pulling their boats into or out of the water or sorting out their nets. Some friendly fishermen spotted Jim and I taking photos of them coiling their nets and insisted that we posed with them and their nets. I suspect that Jim has a similar photo of me 'helping' with the nets. I did however have to watch my step when walking north along the shore as there is a fishing village at the top of the beach without sanitation. Given the location the appropriate solution is for the people to use the littoral (the area between high and low water) as their latrine so that the water cleans the area twice a day and disperses the debris into a dilute state. Sensible but not so great for paddling through the waves. The pigs seemed to be enjoy it though. I love swimming in the sea but decided not to swim on that beach but later in the day the sea was full of life and people having fun. I managed to pick up some rather unpleasant gastro-intestinal bug that afflicted a good many of us from the conference. I suspect that we all fell prey to a virus as we gradually went down with the bug and didn't all fall ill at the same time.

Puri seems to be a popular place for backpackers and felt a bit like it should be on the hippy trail. The conference was held in the only hotel big enough for the numbers but I added a few days onto the conference to have a break from work and the delights of Koraput. I struck lucky with the hotel I chose for my extra days, a delightful place called the Z Hotel, apparently the former home of a maharajah with wonderfully big, clean, airy rooms and a communal balcony area with breeze blowing in and the sound of the sea just a few hundred metres away. We met some really interesting people staying there, it seemed to be one of the places that attracts some eccentrics as well as the more ordinary like me.

I took a day trip with my volunteer friend Sheila to Konark a few kilometres north of Puri to see the Sun Temple, a Unesco World Heritage site. This was fascinating with some extraordinary stone carvings and was built in the form a chariot for the sun god Surya with 12 pairs of wheels and pulled by 7 pairs of horses. Much of the stone has crumbled away through erosion of other damage but it is still a tremendous piece of architecture. What I hadn't realised until I saw the place and heard the guide's descriptions was that many of the sculptures appear to be inspired by the Karma Sutra. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konark_Sun_Temple"> Sun Temple <\a>.

Festival of Colours

2010-03-01T19:07:00.001+05:30

I've just emerged from one of the maddest and most colourful days of my life. Today, Koraput celebrated Holi, the festival of colours. I've tried to find out what Holi is all about. Some say it is to celebrate the change from winter to spring, some say it's the triumph of good over evil, some refer to the legend of Prahalad and Holika. It probably has a combination of roots and is celebrated in many parts of India by people smearing each other with paint and throwing coloured powder and dye over anyone and anything in their path.

Whatever the reason, it has been a good excuse to relax and have fun for many people in Koraput. I went out for the day with my new friend Anne Heslop, a professional photograper based in London who funds various small projects here in Orissa (Anne Heslop). Annie's charity, Goats and Hopes has a number projects including the funding of 2 schools near the town of Koraput. These schools were built and run for a few years by the Save the Children Fund. When they withdrew their funding, the schools were threatened with closure until Anne managed to find sponsors to help her fund the continued running of the schools. Annie also raises funds for mosquito nets and malaria education, Koraput being a high risk area (30% of India's malaria cases are here in Orissa and of those, 90% of those cases are the most dangerous sort, cerebral malaria) and she has projects running to supply solar lights to remote villages without electricity. Anne spends a few weeks in Koraput each year visiting her projects and doing photography to help with her fundraising. I was lucky enough to meet her last week and we soon made friends.

Annie has been videoing children at the schools to create a film to send to her sponsors and to try to attract new sponsors and asked me if I would like to spend the day with her while she worked at the schools. Little did I know what people mean when they talk about celebrating Holi.

A village near Lamtaput in Koraput district, Odisha

2010-02-27T21:42:00.000+05:30

The main street

The baby didn't know what to make of this strange-looking white person wielding a large contraption in front of their face. Pretty scary I think

This is what I like to see, sharing resources

The children all seem to do work as soon as they are strong enough. Sometimes it's looking after their younger siblings, sometimes it's helping with the family chores, sometimes it's helping their parents grow their food, sometimes it's going out to earn money to help the family survive.

But they still manage to have fun

Jackfruits swelling on the tree and a mango tree in full bloom. I can't wait for the mango harvest!

Some more paddy fields

2010-02-25T19:23:00.000+05:30

I found out that a by-product of the paddy fields is small fish that live in the irrigated land. No fish in these photos but to my western eyes it was an impressive sight. The thing that surprised me was the sound of rushing water as the river drained and cascaded slowly down the land

The paddy is sown in nursery fields after harvest and the seedling transferred by hand into the main paddy fields (padia or bila). This seems to achieve a better rate of germination and seedling survival than scattering and although the work looks backbreaking to my pandered western eyes, provides much needed work and wages for the community.

The cranes seem to like the irrigated fields. Maybe they're fishing as well?

A lovely garden

2010-02-24T13:03:00.001+05:30

I had another trip out to the field at the weekend, this time to an area close to the Machkund Dam on the border with Andhra Pradesh. The Machkund river was dammed in the late 1940's as part of a large hydro-electricity scheme. The project resulted in the displacement of many adivasi villages and families and also disrupted the irrigation that had been developed for the cultivation of paddy.

The local communities are working hard to make a sustainable living from their land with many self-help groups (SHGs) set up to facilitate the process. We were out with a colleague from another NGO talking to the community about the potential of setting up cooperatives to manage the cashew cultivation, harvest and marketing. Cashew is an important crop in this area, there are cashew plantations growing in the dry soil, many of them managed by big corporations which may not always get the best deal for the adivasi community.

I was taken on a tour through a thriving vegetable garden cultivated by a SHG. It put my gardening efforts to shame. To my inexpert eye, the soil here looks dry, lacking in organic matter and difficult to make productive. I clearly know nothing about growing vegetables.

These tomatoes may not look as visually impressive as the ones we see in our supermarkets at home but the flavour is wonderful and they cost anything between 2 and 15 rupees in the markets here, depending on demand and the weather conditions.

The potatoes are also very tasty but like growers the world over, there are pests that also make their attack on the crop, in this case rats

Carrying some of the day's harvest into the village

A glimpse of life in the village of Khajuripadar

2010-02-21T18:04:00.000+05:30

I met some lovely people in Khajuripadar. Most of them don't even speak Oriya but their own tribal dialect although most will understand Oriya. My pitiful attempts at speaking Oriya elicited much laughter and teasing but we managed to communicate somehow and I was made to feel very welcome. The project coordinators can all speak pretty good English and many of their team members manage a few English words but one afternoon I was left to fend for myself for the afternoon while the teams went out to do some field work. I sat down in the shade with my Oriya book to try to do some homework but was soon made to get some exercise with a cricket bat. We discovered that I seem to be able to hit a ball (usually onto a thatched roof or into a neighbours yard) but am without the capacity to catch a ball. Never mind, at least I managed to hit the ball.

This is the house where I slept each night. The room was sparse but clean. The floors are all bare, hard packed soil but very solid and kept well brushed. I did have a bed but the lack of mattress made me appreciate my own bed all the more when I got back to Koraput. I felt very guilty when I found that this room is usually used by some of the team members who had vacated it to give me a private room. I did share it with a bat that kept flapping around one night.

These pictures make the place look idyllic. It is very beautiful and peaceful, a remarkably relaxing place to stay. However, we must not forget what it must be like living in such a remote place when you are sick, have no money to travel or pay for medicines, your children can't get to school, the only water supply is a single pump shared by all, there is one toilet in the village and then there's the monsoon which will turn those hard, compacted soil surfaces into mud.

This lady, who had the loveliest, sweetest smile I've seen for a long time spent hours sweeping the village clean every day. She put me to shame, I will try never to moan about doing the housework again.

A bit about food

2010-02-21T17:56:00.000+05:30

I was fed very well while staying out in Khajuripadar. There may be little money, no electricity, no piped water and nothing in the way of mod cons but they know how to cook good meals and look after their guests. The feminist in me was very gratfied to see most of the cooking being done by men, there seemed to be no expectation that this was women's work. Sadly I missed out on the feast that was being prepared on my last day in the village. A couple of the team had gone to another village to buy some chicken and this had taken longer than anticipated and we needed to set off back to Koraput before the meal was ready. The preparation of the chickens was a bit delayed by one of them making a bid for an escape and being chased around the village by men waving sticks and trying to catch it. However, the racing chicken was brought to a humane conclusion.

Singeing off the last few feathers after plucking.

Dismembering the chicken ready for the pot

A kadei of dali simmering away on the stove.

The Khajuripadar equivalent of a 3-ring stove, carefully attended by Malati, one of the main tribal leaders in this area.

Gopal took me into Ramagiri a couple of times to get a hearty breakfast of idli, made by steaming a batter of fermented black lentils and rice flour, served with some sort of savoury dali type of mixture. I had almost got to the bottom of my leaf-bowl full of 3 large idli + dali when I was presented with another 3 to munch through. I did not need to eat again for a long time after.

I managed to take a photo of the main street in Ramagiri after swabbing myself down, having got breakfast all down myself.

Some Khajuripadar life

2010-02-21T17:55:00.000+05:30

I came across some interesting trees in Khajuripadar, most of which are not found in the UK. One of our meetings was held in the shade of a tentuli (tamarind) tree which gave us some welcome respite from the heat of the Indian sun.

I've often used tamarind when preparing food but not seen the fruit growing on a tree which has very attractive foliage. Here are a few tentuli fruits hiding in the leaves.

This is a very large and probably very old cashew tree with a few tentuli leaves in the foreground. I have seen cashew trees many times here in Orissa but all the others I've seen have been in commercially managed plantations where the trees are kept small and easy to harvest. This one looks much more majestic but is probably more of a challenge to pick the nuts.

These are baby jackfruits, a member of the mulberry family. These fruits can grow up to 20-90 cm long and 15-50 cm wide with a weight ranging from 4.5-20kg or even as much as 50kg. How they stay on the tree and don't break the branches with their weight I have no idea, I hope to see these fruits when they are full grown. To the best of my knowledge I've never eaten jackfruit, it's not something I have ever seen or even heard of in the UK. I'm told it's added to curries or pickled and one of my colleagues has promised me that he will make me a curry with jackfruit. I look forward to it.

This is a young wine tree. I don't know the proper botanical name for them but there are a couple of species of palm tree here which are tapped for their sap which I'm told is sweet and tasty. The liquor (not alcoholic) is sold and a strong, healthy wine tree can yield 70 lakh INR. A valuable resource.

The harvesters work out which branches to tap by looking for where birds nests have been woven, high in the trees. This, I was told, shows the branches which are full of the sap. I've added a couple of photos here used in a previous post, now that I've found more about the process.

The tapping is done high up in the mature tree, lopping off the selected branch and hanging a bowl under the cut edge to collect the seepage. The tapper climbs up a bamboo 'ladder' (more like a pole with a few notches on) to collect the sap.

I don't think that lizards are used as a source of food here but this one didn't hang around for long when it realised I'd spotted it.

No village is complete without it's canines. These pups are from a family of 3 survivors of a litter that lost their mother when they were only around 1 month old. They're lucky to have survived but looked healthy and full of energy, scampering around and digging holes in the ground for us to trip up in.

Paddy fields

2010-02-19T20:57:00.000+05:30

The first thing I spotted when we reached this are on our return journey from Khajuripadar was a group of water buffaloes, grazing in a harvested paddy field.

Then I noticed a solitary man, working away at the irrigation retaining banks with his mattock. It looks really hard work and I can't imagine doing that sort of work in the heat of the Indian sun.

Then I turned round to look at the other side of the road and saw large groups of women coming out of the irrigated paddy fields, newly planted with the second crop of the season.

It was an extrardinary sight, great splashes of colour as the women, all dressed immaculately in their brightly coloured saris made their way back to the road along the tracks on the tops of the banks at the end of their days work.

They asked me to take their photo when they gathered at the roadside. I'm only sorry that I'll never see any of them again as I'd love to be able to hand out prints of these photos to the beautiful subjects.

Heading off home at the end of a hard day's work.

A trip to Gupteswar Cave Temple

2010-02-19T19:51:00.001+05:30

I've only just found out that a banyan is actually a fig, the seeds dispersed in the crevices of host trees by fruit eating birds. The plant germinates in the host tree, sending roots down to the ground, sometimes known as "strangler figs" Banyan

We spotted this one when Ananda took me to the Gupteswar Cave Temple, close to the Chattisgarh border on my last morning out in the field. We had done all the work that we could out there and decided that we'd relax by going to this fascinating temple, dedicated to Lord Shiva. Gupteswar Cave Temple

It is a very holy place for Hindus but I have to admit that I'm glad I wasn't there last week, on the day of Shiva Ratri when thousands of pilgrims descended on the place to worship.

Just to prove that I really did go there, I asked my friend to take a photo of me posing in front of the priests. I had to do some unexpected laundry the night before as custom requires that anyone going to this temple wears clean clothes. I had of course run out of clean clothes so a session with a bucket and Krishna helping me with the water pump was needed in the preceding evening to cleanse my clothes in preparation for the trip. At least everything dries quickly here. I also had the required bucket bath in the morning before we set out but not sure I was so clean after an hour on the back of a motorbike.

Ritual bathing in the Kolab River before going into the temple a few metres up the river bank.

The drive there and back was lovely, through dense forest with glimpses of the Eastern Ghat mountains through the trees.

It was a lovely to get a bit of a break to do some exploring. The only downside was that it took about an hour each way on the back of a motorbike, followed by our journey back to Koraput later in the afternoon. A total of more than 4 hours riding pillion left me tired, dirty, aching but happy to have a good few days out.

A few days away

2010-02-19T07:23:00.000+05:30

I've just returned from 4 days spent out in the field in the village of Khajuripadar, near Ramagiri, west of Koraput and close to the border with he state of Chattisgarh. This is a tribal area and many of the villages have no electricity or sanitation. Khajuripadar is one of these villages. I went there to spend time with some of the project coordinators and their teams to try to get a better picture of their projects and how they are monitored and evaluated. I've come away with some tricky project management problems to think about and try to find some ideas for improvement. Working in a remote area without electricity or even a filling station to refuel motorbikes is a problem that I can't resolve and must cause real difficulties working out there but hopefully I'll be able to find some ideas for some of the more manageable problems.

SPREAD runs 3 projects in the area: community based rehabilitation (CBR) for people with disability (PWD), campaigning for land, food and work and finally, tribal self-rule. I went with the CBR team to visit a school where they planned to carry out a sensitisation program with the students. This was intended to raise the awareness of the children of what it means to be disabled, to get them thinking about what they, as able-bodied people, could do to help the PWDs and what can be achieved by PWDs with the support of their communities. I was asked to introduce myself, I think the children wondered why a strange, western woman had landed in their classroom and were very curious about me. I told them a little about how most children with disabilities are educated in mainstream schools in the UK. I also used some personal anecdotes, using my son who works as a communications assistant with students with hearing impairment using sign language, my aunt who achieved much from her life and career despite her cerebral palsy and my husband, who continued post-grad education following a serious head injury and now works as a lecturer (thanks for giving me the inspiration guys!). I was a little taken aback at the end of the session when 3 children ran up to me, crouched down and touched my feet, something I was not expecting to experience and I'm not sure that I reacted in the way that they might have expected. I just hope I didn't cause them any offence by not knowing how to respond.

Ananda and his team talked with the students, getting them thinking and talking about the different sorts of disablities that they might encounter then got them participating in a game intended to help them recognise some of the problems. The pictures tell the story.

What's it like to be hard of hearing?

Or how do you manage with limited use of your hands and arms?

Having a leg tied up can make moving around a bit tricky

A bit of guidance helps

You can learn to do things by yourself but it helps to have people around keeping an eye out for you

It helps to be young and fit to move around like this

I returned home to Koraput tired, filthy and with much to think about and lots to write about that will need to go into more blogs later. My first task on my return was to have a shower and wash my hair. Hours sat on the back of a motorbike in the dry, dusty environment had left it's mark on m!

This is what the water looked like after I had washed my hair.

A proper day off work

2010-02-07T20:06:00.003+05:30

At last I've managed to get someone to teach me Odiya. It's nearly 6 months since I arrived here in Koraput and I hadn't continued with the lessons I started in Delhi last summer. A lovely man who lives very nearby has come to my house every day for the last 3 days to spend an hour and a half talking Odiya to me while I try to speak it back to him. I only wish I'd started this months ago. I would love to know why the author of my Oriya book included my the translation of "I am keeping the elephant in the fridge"

Today's lesson was enhanced by the building work which has been taking place all day next door, despite Sunday being a day of rest.

My yard taken over with building equipment and the foreman's transport and a glimpse of the underside of the of the roof overhang.

The sun went down while they were still busy working on the roof so my fusebox was utilised to provide a direct supply to the spotlights. A very noisy and dusty day but full of laughter and giggles.

A volunteer's rest days

2010-01-31T14:36:00.001+05:30

After 6 months in India, struggling to keep going working a 6 day week while looking after my home, walking everywhere to get to work and do my shopping, doing all my washing by hand I realised I was getting completely exhausted. I spoke to my manager, asking if we could talk about reducing the number of Saturdays worked, expecting to compromise with having every 3rd or 4th Saturday off but he said straight away, stop working Saturdays. Hurrah! (and thank you).

Last weekend was my first Saturday off when we went to Vizag, something I'd been thinking about doing for a long time and would have taken a day of leave to achieve. This weekend was my first full weekend at home. So what did I do? I crawled out of bed on Saturday morning feeling dreadful, staggered around the house for the morning, forcing myself to eat some breakfast before giving up and going back to bed late morning. Which is where I stayed for most of the day, just getting up late afternoon to make a cup of tea and decide I couldn't face cooking any dinner. A couple of hours of sitting up in the evening was enough to finish me off and send me back to bed where I managed to get around 8 hours sleep. That must be the first time I've slept that long for about 30 years!

At least I managed to do one of my intended jobs on Saturday morning and defrosted and cleaned my fridge before retiring to bed. The daily (sometimes several times a day) power cuts had left the ice box with thick layers of ice making it impossible to put anything into it and reducing the efficiency of the fridge. At least the relative warmth here made it quite quick to defrost and wipe clean.

Sunday seemed a much better day after a good sleep and I walked into the market to do some shopping although much slower than usual. I then decided that I would do one of the other jobs I had on my list for the weekend and wash the floors. I have given them all a fairly regular mopping down with string mop dipped in a bucket but this usually has the effect of swilling dirty water around and spreading the dirt. This time I was going to wash them down the Indian way. All the floors are solid with drainage holes in various places at floor level. This means that you can give them a good dousing down with water and just sweep the water all over the floor and towards the drains. I lifted all the mats and furniture and put them outside out of the way

I don't have a hosepipe so had to fill buckets with water in the shower and carry them through to chuck over the floors. The water turned an alarming shade of orange with the soil and dust residues that had accumulated staining it but it got gradually better as I threw more buckets of water over the floors and swished it around a bit. The tricky bit was steering the water towards the drains as the gradient of the floors isn't ideal. I then found that one of the drains didn't go outside but into the Puja room, now used as a store room and filled with various bags of things left behind by another VSO volunteer. I opened the door to see what it was like and found a couple of inches of water had accumuted in their, swilling around the bags on the floor. This was not quite what I'd intended. I fished the bags out of the water, put them on shelves to drip dry and tried to sweep the water back out of that room and towards the other drain at the front of the house.

I heard lots of giggles and squeals of laughter and looked out to see the 6 women who are working on the building site next door standing on the wall gazing into my house in fascination, seeming to take great delight in watching me wandering around in bare feet with the legs of my salwar rolled up out of the water, bending down with my broom trying to persuade the water that it really did want to go outside. I'd love to know how they can work all day doing really heavy, dirty work while continuing to look beautiful and elegant in their saris with not a hair out of place while I ended up hot and sweaty, filthy and with my hair all over the place. They clearly have a talent that I lack.

After that job I had to have a shower and wash my clothes, deciding to leave washing the other half of the house until next week. The thing is, I know the floors are clean but they don't look any different.

A weekend of rest and and recuperation

2010-01-27T18:58:00.001+05:30

I arrived in India in the middle of July, attending a month of in-country orientation training on Delhi before travell ing to Koraput, arriving there 23rd August. I realised recently how tired I was feeling. I have of course had days off, rest days and festival holidays but most of these days have been spent just doing basic chores with the occasional day trip somewhere. I've also had two trips back to Delhi but these were to attend workshops which, although a change from normal work were not relaxing or real time off. As it was my birthday at the weekend I decided to have a few days away with my friend Sheila, recently arrived in nearby Rayagada who also celebrated her birthday recently.

We decided to go to Vishakapatnam (often known as Vizag ), a city at the north of Andhra Pradesh, a couple of hundred kilometres south-east of Koraput, on the coast in the Bay of Bengal. After a bit of a battle with my internet connection I managed to buy rail tickets for Sheila to get from Rayagada to Koraput on Saturday then for us to travel together to Vizag and taking a slightly different return route (to fit in with the available seats) of Vizag to Rayagada on Monday evening then me to travel on to Koraput on Tuesday. Easy, we thought.

Sheila arrived on Saturday only slightly late. I found an auto driver to take me to the station to meet her and managed to do a deal for him to take us to my house for us to spend a few hours before returning to collect us and transport us back to the station for the next leg of the journey (directing anyone to my house is a challenge given the lack of house name or road name, it can be awkward living without the benefit of an address). Safely on our way on the next train we had a bit of a delay at one station where we stopped for about an hour without obvious reason but arriving safely if a little late at our hotel in Vizag. My guidebook described the place as looking like the inside of an Ambassador car and although I'm not sure that's how I'd describe it, it was very nice and we had a really nice dinner of prawns. I then luxuriated in a nice hot bath with bubble bath. The first bath I've had since leaving UK. Bliss!

The next day we decided to hire a car with driver for the day to take us round a few of the sights of Vizag. We were taken to a couple of temples, a film studio where we walked round the set of some soap opera and watched some actors being choreographed while practicing dance moves, a park where we watched women playing games and beautiful Rishikonda beach for a long walk where I had to go paddling in the sea. We had a nice lunch of crab and prawns at a restaurant near the beach supplemented by yet more prawns and chicken for dinner and another hot bath in the evening. It seemed a nice way to spend a birthday.

The next day, Monday, we walked along the beach near the hotel, returned to the hotel for a late lunch of yet more prawns (we can't get these in Koraput or Rayagada) before getting the train back to Rayagada in the evening where we went to Sheila's and I slept on the floor. We had a fairly leisurely morning there before I packed away my sleeping bag and weekend bag, preparing to get my last train south to Koraput. Which is where things started to get tricky.

I had an SMS message from Jon back home in the UK, telling me he'd seen Corey (Koraput VSO colleague) posting something about a bandh on Facebook. A bandh is a strike. This worried me a little and not having access to the internet where I was, I asked him to check the Indian rail website for my train. All trains to Koraput were cancelled. I phoned Dusmant back in Koraput (forgetting that he as on holiday as it was Republic Day) and asked for his help. He told me to get the Hirakhand Express the next morning, another train due to leave late morning or the Howrah Express in the evening. I didn't want to get the Hirakhand Express as it leaves Rayagada at 5:30, it's too far to walk (along a very dangerous road) and it's impossible to get an auto to collect from Sheila's house early morning. I made a quick call back home to ask Jon to check the rail timetable for the next day. The only train going to Koraput on Wednesday was the Hirakhand Express, presumably all the the rolling stock for all other train services was in the wrong place after the strike. A cup of tea was needed to take me back to my previously relaxed state.

Then Sheila had an idea and went round to see her landlady, who lives next door, returning a few minutes later having got her landlady's assistance to find a solution. The auto driver who takes her daughter Rinki to school today had agreed to come out to collect me. Which was good news except it meant another night sleeping on the floor then getting up soon after 4:00am to be sure I was ready and packed up on time and Sheila was woken up by the alarm and disturbance as well. We waited. And waited. At 5:30 we gave up and went back to our beds as that was when the train was due to leave. At 6:30 the doorbell went. It was Rinki, asking what had happened. We explained the auto had not come so we were trying to get more sleep. At 7:30 the doorbell went again, this time Rinki with her mother, offering more assistance the following day. I decided I really needed to try to get back to Koraput today or I'd end up missing yet another day of work. It seemed a bit early to make phone calls so I sent an SMS message to Dusmant asking for his help to get a taxi. At 8:00 he phoned me to work out a plan followed by another call half an hour later to tell me the taxi would arrive at 10:30. Good news although I thought it seemed a little optimistic to expect the taxi to arrive by 10:30 as it had taken me around 3 hours to do the same journey the previous week. I spent some time with Sheila in her NGO office, looking at some of the things she'd been working on before leaving Rayagada at around 12:15. The end of a nice weekend away.

We eventually found out that there were 2 strikes, one called by Congress and the other by Naxalites (Maoists), affecting road and rail traffic, educational, business and commercial work. Fortunately the drive home was good, travelling through interesting scenery with a good driver, stopping briefly on the way to see his sister and young nephew. I was amused to see a jeep travelling along with a good load of people on board with the addition of goats both on the roof and more peering out of the back

I've nothing against builders but....

2010-01-20T18:20:00.000+05:30

Followers of my blog will be familiar with my moans about the builders next door. I've been getting increasingly annoyed by the mess left behind each day. The builders had taken over my roof every day to use as a platform to do much of the building work, leaving trails of filth behind them as they carried bricks, sand and mortar up the steps. I lost the plot a bit one day when I came home feeling unwell and was trying to relax in the house when several of them started shouting and messing around just outside my open door before racing upstairs to eat their lunch on my roof. The plot-owner frequently meanders up the steps, sometimes with wife, son and other family members to inspect works and of course the child likes racing around on my roof.

I'm not a particularly house-proud person but I try to keep it reasonably clean so that I have a nice place to return to, not one where I have to pick my way through rubble, sand and cement. I'm starting to feel like my personal space has been invaded and am wary about putting out my laundry with all the red dirt and other mess. I asked the leaseholder to raise it with house owner and the builders did start cleaning up at the end of the day. For about a week. Then they took a couple of weeks holiday and have returned to their old habits.

I decided to do as I'd threatened previously and put a padlock on the gate to stop them getting into the yard. They climb over the wall instead. Anyone got any broken glass I can cement onto the wall?

To sum up, the once empty plot that was home to cows and various wildlife now has a house slowly emerging using interesting building techniques.

This is the roof - or will be eventually

I thought there might be a boundary dispute in the offing when the wall at the front of the new house was built partly underneath the overhang of mine at the front but they've just managed to mould the new wall around mine.

Koraput times

2010-01-18T22:28:00.000+05:30

I had a day out of Koraput yesterday, travelling north to the town of Rayada (sometimes spelt Rayagarha). This was to see my friend Sheila, a recently arrived VSO volunteer living alone in that town. I went there in a hired car with Michele from VSO UK who was visiting us Orissa volunteers and we had a really nice day out. On the way we asked our driver to stop so we could take some photos of paddy fields being cultivated. It looked hard work, wading through all that clay mud and water

We drove through some spectacular countryside, mostly forested with lovely hills

I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to go as I'd had a really bad night on Saturday with a bout of the dreaded Delhi belly and was feeling a bit delicate. However, I decided that I'd stopped vomiting and with the reassurance of an Immodium tablet I'd take the risk. I came to India with a small supply of first aid and medical supplies which included 2 packets of Immodium. I hadn't used any until Sunday but while my son was staying with me, he asked if he could have a pack to take with him in case he was struck while travelling on the trains and my husband had also used some when he was unwell but I assumed I'd be able to restock without any problem. I went to three drug stores today to try to buy more supplies, only to be told no, they don't sell anything like that. Oh dear,I only have 2 left. You can buy almost anything over the counter in India but not Immodium.

Last week I ventured into a shop that had recently opened up which looked like it might supply some of the foods I like to treat myself to now and again with the added advantage of being significantly closer to my house so not so far to carry heavy items home. First I was really pleased to be able to buy some very nice jam and marmalade. Back home, I make my own preserves and the jam I'd had in India was all very sweet, very processed and not very nice at all. This jam tastes of the fruit it's made from and even more exciting, doesn't contain added refined sugar but is sweetened with grape juice. I asked if they sold brown bread and was told that he could get some in if I called later in the week so we agreed on Friday.

I went in on Friday only to be told that my neighbours from just up the road had bought both the loaves in the shop but he'd get some more in for the next day. I was a little irritated that the loaf I'd ordered had been sold to someone else but true to his promise, there was a loaf of brown bread for me the following day. Although it is not up to the home-made standard of wholemeal loaf I eat at home it was much nicer than the sweet white sliced bread I'd been consuming up till now. Another good result. The shop-keeper had asked if there was anything else I wanted so I asked for muesli. He promised me faithfully he'd get some in and to go back on the 18th. So, back I went today, the 18th. He looked horrified when I went in and told me that the 2 packs of muesli he'd got in for me had both been sold just a few minutes earlier - to the same neighbours who had purloined my brown bread. This is war - you know who you are! The shop-keeper was mortified and promised he'd get me more in as quickly as possible and bring it round to my house. Which will bring the next problem as I don't have an address for my house. Life in Koraput can get very challenging sometimes.

I bought some fabric a few weeks ago ready to get some more salwar kameez suits made up. So far I'd only had 3 suits which is just about enough but does mean that I have had a never-ending cycle of washing and drying to make sure that I always have a clean one ready to wear. I decided I'd splash out and get another couple made up. The first ones that were tailored last year were a perfect fit and very well sewn. Unfortunately the new ones were sewn too tight and were not going to be wearable. When they tailor clothes here they leave big seams so that the garments can be adjusted if needed so I just needed to take them back and ask for them to be adjusted. That brought the challenge of working out how to tell explain the problem to the tailor. That shop is staffed mostly by deaf men. There is one speaking-hearing man but he does not speak English. I decided the easiest way would be to take a well-fitting kameez with me and show the difference in size between that and the new ones. Great idea as he immediately realised the problem, except that he then took possession of the properly fitting one to use as a model for resizing hte others, which meant that I was reduced to just 2 sets of clothing suitable for me to wear to work.

We worked out that I'd return to collect the adjusted garments on Friday, at the same time as picking up the choli (sari blouse) that was also on order. Back I went on Friday. He gave me the choli but when I gestured that I also wanted the kameez he shook his head and pointed at the calendar to show the next day. OK, it's tomorrow. Tomorrow came and I arrived there at around 6 in the evning. He looked at me, shook his head again, looked at the clock and pointed to 8. I shook my head and pointed away, trying to explain that I had already arranged to meet up with friends for dinner. He pointed to the following day. I gestured that I was out for the day so would go back on Monday.

Momday evening arrived. Down into the town I went to buy some bananas and tomatoes and stopped at the tailor on the way back home. He looked at me and when I saw his face I immediately realised that they'd forgotten all about the order. So I sat down for about an hour and a half while the hurriedly fixed the problem. I managed to have a good conversation with the tailor, probably the longest conversation I'd had with anyone all day. He now knows I have 2 children although I think he thinks that my daughter is studying to be a doctor rather than doing a PhD in history and we know how old we and our respective children are. He nipped out to the shop next door and returned with a man who said hello to me, then the tailor gestured drinking - which I assumed meant I was being offered chai. Han, I said. The man went off and returned a few seconds later with a bottle of sweetened flavoured milk, which apparently contained nature-identical artificial flavouring. But it was a very kind thought and helped to give me the energy I needed to finish the walk home. Fortunately my adjusted suits all fit me very well now.

A little bit of wildlife

2010-01-16T15:24:00.011+05:30

I've been interested to see the different flora and fauna that exists in Koraput. Many things are familiar - sparrows, crows, cows etc and of course some are variants on the familiar - bats with huge wingspan and spiders come to mind. I was curious to see the occupant of this spider's web but all I managed to spot was one fat hairy leg lurking at the bottom of the funnel.

I have tried many times to get photos of the big bats flying overhead without the aid of a tripod but this is the best I have managed - pitiful isn't it?!

You see cows wandering around everywhere here, eating cast-off vegetables, cardboard and sometimes even pulling posters off walls to munch when something takes their fancy. What I like to watch is the way that they seem to love being groomed by birds that are presumably feeding off parasites.

I am still on the lookout for the bears and tigers that are said to exist in the vicinity.
I've seen a couple of snakes, something that I think was a praying mantis (regular followers of my blog may remember a photo of a green insect on some of my laundry in October last year), insects and butterflies constantly darting through the air, cockroaches and ants scuttling around, the all too numerous feral dogs and inevitable rats.
I share my house with lizards and as they seem to like feeding off mosquitoes I am happy to share my accommodation with them. I was surprised by a splashing noise last week, late at night, just as I was dropping off to sleep. I assumed at first it was something to do with my water filter so got up to investigate, half expecting to find it had overflowed or broken but it looked completely normal. Curious and slightly alarmed by a continued splashing coming from somewhere around the bathroom I ventured forth, half-expecting to see something emerging from the squat toilet. I found that a lizard had fallen off the wall and into a bucket of soapy water that I'd left, soaking some laundry. The poor thing had tried to get out but couldn't cope with the slippery, wet plastic walls of the bucket and was trapped. I grapped a big slotted spoon from the kitchen to fish it out and scrutinised it to try to work out if it was still alive when it leapt off the spoon and scuttled off across the room, leaving a trail of soapy water behind it. I guess it was still alive.

More outings

2010-01-14T11:14:00.002+05:30

The people at SPREAD work hard. Really hard. The travelling can be tiring because of the distances and the state of the roads. Transport and travel can be a real challenge in Orissa where the roads are rough and buses are limited or non-existant. Even for people lucky enough to have a motorbike, it can take a long time to get places. Some of the work is probably emotionally draining as well as all the official bureaucracy that has to be battled through to achieve their objectives, to say nothing of the exhausting travel on Odissi roads and buses.
But they know how to enjoy themselves and yesterday we had another picnic. This one was in a different part of the district to the last one I went to and gave different people the opportunity to attend. We were in a jeep-type vehicle and it took us 2 1/2 hours to travel the 80-90km to get there. We had to have a last-minute change of plan for the venue. We were hoping to go to a waterfall somewhere by the Machkund Dam but the road had been blocked by naxals so a new site had to be selected.

We ended up in a forest by a very nice river, giving us a water supply for the cooking (all well boiled!), for washing up afterwards and place to play and pose.

A groundsheet was laid out for us to share and Amin directed proceedings from a comfortable spot.

That knife came into good use again for chopping the vegetables that went into the curries, along with the chicken, herbs and spices.

When it was time to go home we had to make the most of the transport available. I was lucky enough to be ushered towards the front passenger seat of our jeep. I think there were 11 of us on board! One of the twins came and sat on my knee and soon fell asleep. Fortunately the weather had been kind to us while we were out in the forest but the journey home was through lashing rain making it even slower and harder for the driver. Potholes get hidden in floods all too easily.

Someone explained to me that the Odiya word for picnic translates to forest feast, forests being the preferred location to gather for the festivities. I noticed creepers climbing up some of the trees was told were peppercorns (I tried one of the berries and it was definitely pepper) and there were lots of coffee plants growing under the trees. I'd seen many of these plants growing in Koraput district and had no idea what they were until yesterday.

For those of you suffering the current snowy weather in UK

2010-01-12T07:13:00.003+05:30

I measured the temperature on the roof of my house this morning - fairly early, before the day really warmed up - it was over 34 degrees centigrade. I did like the satellite image I saw on the web the other day
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/8447023.stm

Walking to work a couple of days ago I stopped to watch the paddy fields being ploughed. There were 3 teams pulling the ploughs, I think one pair were water buffalo but the rest were oxen. The herdsmen had bare feet. I don't think my feet are tough enough to survive such rigours.

On arriving at the office I met 3 colleagues on their way out to the car. After our initial namaskars and subha sakālas (hello and good morning) I asked them where they were headed and on being told that they were heading for the village of Ramagiri to a meeting with the district sub-collector and development officer to tell the villagers about development plans for the surrounding forest. This is required under the Forest Rights Act but it's good to hear that the act is being followed. When they asked me if I wanted to join them I jumped at the chance. I wasn't carrying my really nice camera which is much too heavy and bulky to carry around with me all the time but at least I had a nice little compact camera that J gave me for Christmas and I now carry with me at all times for those unexpected photo opportunity moments. In I jumped and off we went over the very rough roads to Ramagiri, close to the Chattisgarh border, stopping for a cup of particularly delicious cha en route.

This being a meeting held to tell the Adivasi community of the area about the future of their forest it was well attended and held outside, under a tree for some shade.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the official visitors chose not to use the chairs and desks that had been provided for them, instead sitting down on the ground with the people who had come to listen to them.

As usual, I suffered the language problem although this may also have been an issue for the visitors as the local community speak their own tribal languages. However, despite my pathetic inability to understand the words that were being spoken the body language of all participants told me a lot. It got noticeably more relaxed as the meeting continued.

After a while I wandered off roumd the village. This was my third visit to this settlement and each time it's been a real treat. The place is spotless, kids play in the streets and the people very welcoming despite me shoving my camera in their faces.

I spotted a couple of very recent arrivals among the population. I didn't go too close, she looked a bit fierce and probably would have given me a good butting if I'd gone any closer to her new babies which were very wobbly on their legs.

This man made it look really easy to create a neat, dense, woven bamboo fence. I can just imagine how it would end up looking if I had tried to do the same thing!

A different sort of works' outing

2010-01-04T16:57:00.000+05:30

There seems to be a tradition of going out for picnics to celebrate new year here in India and typically many NGOs will hold a picnic for all the staff and their families to attend. The picnic organised by my NGO was unlike any picnic that I've ever been to before.

First we had to drive for around an hour to get to the chosen picnic spot, somewhere near the tribal village of Nandapur. We met up with colleagues who had travelled from their home villages. Then we made our way to a good spot, well away from all the other revellers and the road.

It seemed like a nice spot, nice views in both directions.

The camp-fire was stoked and the pots put onto heat

Meanwhile the vegetables needed to be prepared - enough for about 40 people. I need to learn how to use one of these knives. They have a flat metal handle that comes off the blade at a 90 degree angle which is held down with a foot or a leg, leaving the blade pointing up. The vegetables are then sliced by being pushed down onto the cutting edge and the pieces caught in the hands. Very neat solution to no chopping boards.

Everything was cooked to perfection over the fire, well-tended by some of the men in the group.

While lunch was cooking some of us wandered upstream to a waterfall and watched people swimming and zooming down the water-slide. I was very tempted to join them, it looked great fun and was a very warm day (compared to a UK winter).

As is the way with such natural attractions everyone wants to have their photos taken in front of the view. By the time we returned to our picnic spot we had worked up a good appetite and thoroughly enjoyed a what is probably the best picnic meal that I've ever had. I think Jon was a bit taken aback by the whole day!

The clearing up after our lunch was pretty easy, a few passing cows clearing up the leaf plates and the cooking pots being taken down to the river for a good scrubbing with grass and water to clean off the food residues.

The obligatory group shot that has to happen at such events. For once, I am in this shot, I usually manage to hide behind the camera and escape the photos.

Of course, this being an event largely populated by adivasi people, there had to be a dance in it somewhere. The end of a great day out.

I now have to settle back down into a more normal day to day life on my own here in Koraput with the departure back home of husband Jon and son Sam elsewhere in India, suffering from the effects of street food or ice made with dirty water. Get well soon!

Happy new year to all my family and friends

2010-01-01T19:32:00.001+05:30

We saw in the new year in a subdued fashion, falling asleep at some ridiculously early hour, exhausted by life here in Koraput. I guess it's constantly feeling like an alien, unable to communicate except in the most rudimentary fashion but it doesn't take much to make me feel very tired. However, an early night meant that I was bright and fully of energy again on new year's day.

We hired a taxi today to take us to the village of Kotpad, near the border with the neighbouring state of Chattisgarh. Kotpad is famous for it's traditional fabric dying and weaving, using pure cotton or silk, natural vegetable dyes and handlooms, weaving traditional patterns into the fabrics. The taxi driver did not speak English but with the help of my friend Dusmant over the telephone we managed to convey what we wanted to see in the village. With the assistance of a few pedestrians in the town and one who jumped into our car to give directions we managed to find what we were looking for down a tiny little back street where we were made very welcome by the family running that particular weaving and dying enterprise.

The cotton is brought in from Chattisgarh in its raw state. Castor oil and cow dung paste are massaged into the hanks of yarn and then dried in the sun for 12 days to get an even, light, natural colour.

The yarn is then massaged by the dyers stamping on them. The fibre is left incredibly soft by all the soaking and massaging. The yarn that this woman is holding here felt really soft, similar to cotton wool

The weavers grow aal and harvest the roots. Bits of the root are chipped off and collected for drying. The brittle red root-bark gives the color and is chipped off and ground to a fine powder in a stone mill like the ones used for spice or flour. This is then mixed with hot water and used to dye the yarn, being left to soak for around 12 hours with a bit of pummelling to help the dye to impregnate the yarn. The colour of the aal dye can be varied by adding iron dust to give a browner colour and a variety of other dyes are used to get other variations. Unfortunately my lack of Oriya limited my understanding of the explanations that the family were really keen to give.

The yarn is hung to dry then wound into hanks ready for the weaving process.

Kotpad weavers do everything on a simple loom. Everything is done by hand with small shuttles of yarn. The patterns are created by looping yarn in the weft and into the warp. The loom is very rudimentary with thread heddles tied to foot pedals. It apparently takes 20 days to weave a sari length! These saris and shawls are generally done in two colors, one ground and one ornament color, traditionally red on white grounds. All ornament is made with the secondary color. They weave in pure cotton, silk and silk/cotton mix. When you feel this fabric it is incredibly soft.

The finished fabrics were gorgeous and of course I fell for far more than I could really afford but when I compared the prices being charged with those being charged for machine woven fabrics available in the UK they were a bargain. I hope will brighten the day for a few people at home but I did treat myself to a sari length which I will need to take to my friendly deaf tailor to get the choli made up.

Christmas in Koraput

2009-12-28T18:45:00.002+05:30

On Tuesday I attended a public hearing in Koraput. This was facilitated by SPREAD and was a platform for some of the adivasi people that SPREAD works with to present their cases in their quest to attain their right to land. Although I did not understand the dialogue it was interesting to see the dynamics of the meeting and compare it to a similar event in the UK. I don't think many British public hearings start with a song.

The mood seemed to be quite buoyant with smiles from many of the participants and the District Collector. It will be around 6 months before decisions will be made about the cases presented at the hearing but such delays are common with most public hearings

Christmas here in Koraput was quiet. My son arrived on Christmas Eve on the overnight train from Bhubaneswar. It was easy to spot him amongst all the other passengers who disembarked, he being the only white man! This being rural India, Christmas is not a big festival although there is a public holiday on 25th December.

We went for a walk out of the town on Christmas morning, strolling through a small village where we were greeted by people that I see regularly on my walk to work who were curious to know who the new white people in town were. Despite feeling slightly uncomfortable as it felt a bit like walking through someone's back yard there were cheery waves and smiles coming from all directions. We wandered back into the town to go to the market. I've visited the market most weeks since I arrived here in Koraput and have got fairly accustomed to the noise and bustle but I'm not sure my visitors found it quite so easy to walk around. We had a fun evening round at our fellow volunteers' house, all of us contributing something to the dinner. Tomato soup was carried up the road from my house, somehow surviving the trip in the kadei without sloshing overboard.

The next day we were taken out into the field to a remote location somewhere near the border with Andhra Pradesh as guests of a Women's Convention around 80km from Koraput. This was organised by the adivasi women with the support of SPREAD to discuss the rights-issues that they face and what is being done to address them. As ever, I could not understand the speecehes but it was a great privilege to have been invited and to have everyone's permission to take their photos as the SPREAD photographer.

The kids seemed to have fun, the older ones playing outside the tent where all the activities were taking place, peeping in to see what was going on.

We stopped for a cup of cha in the village of Padwa on the return journey and were interested to see just how many people you can get into one auto. We think there were 20 in this one but were not entirely sure as they were jumping in, on the roof and spilling out the other side. I didn't realise that auto engines could pull that much!

I didn't try to count how many were on board this vehicle

All in a morning's work

2009-12-23T08:12:00.000+05:30

I sat in my house eating my breakfast this morning being entertained by the sight of a flock of around 7-8 crows fighting over their breakfast in the yard at the front of my house. Their chosen meal was a dead rat which they were attacking with great gusto. It was lovely to watch them having a tug of war with the carcasse to see which crow could get the biggest chunk. Nice way to start the day, a dead rat is much better than a live rat when it's near my home.

The trash collector came round a little earlier than usual today so I was actually in the house at the right time. I don't put the bucket of rubbish outside the gate for for the man to empty into the his bin as the dogs or cows always get there first, spreading rubbish all round the street in their search for anything edible so if I'm not in when the collector goes down the street blowing his whistle I have to find another disposal mechanism. When I first arrived in Koraput, the trash collector was a man pushing round a barrow with 4 waste bins on board, collecting refuse from the houses along the streets. This changed recently to a man carrying a single bin, throwing in the rubbish at each house which had made me curious and wondering why it had changed and where he put the contents of the single bin when it was full. Today there was a new development. A small 3-wheeled truck was precariously negotiating its way round the narrow, circuitous streets, having to go backwards and forwards a few times to manage the sharp corners. The glass beer bottles in the waste bucket were immediately retrieved for selling and the rest of the contents thrown into the back of the truck. Progress indeed.

This is getting tedious

2009-12-20T19:04:00.000+05:30

Yet again we have had a Sunday without electricity. I have no idea what time it was switched off, all I know is that it was not working when I tried a light switch at around 7 this morning and has only just returned at around 6:30 (with a couple of small hiccups in the preceding hour when it came back, I blew out the candles then it went off again several times). This is the day when many of us volunteers try to catch up on household chores like washing - hard if your water tank is empty and there is no electricity to pump water up from the well.

Sunday is also the day when we do the main shopping for our week's supply of food. This I did achieve, fortunately that is not dependant on a steady supply of power although sadly one of the shops I had assumed would be open was all shuttered up. Tomatoes were today's big bargain at 5 rupees a kilogram. Tomato soup for supper all week I think. Jon is curled up in bed with a dose of the rapid Indian weight-loss diet, poor thing. Is tomato soup good for a dodgy belly?

The building plot next door to my house continues to evolve in mysterious ways. Gaps that had been left for doors and windows have been bricked up while new gaps have been created. A group of 4-6 women do the hard work of mixing the mortar by hand then carrying it up for the brickies to paste the bricks together. All this is done via my front yard, steps and roof which seems to be the easiest way for them to get it up to the height where it's needed, ducking underneath the washing hanging up there to dry, leaving spots of mortar all over the place. There is also a nice trail of splats of mortar, grit and sand en route from the gate to my yard, up the drive and steps and across the roof. Occasionally they sweep up but not very often. I have found myself getting more and more paranoid about keeping the outside of the house clean in an effort to minimise the attraction for ants and to keep the drainage clear and end up sweeping up after them 3-4 times a week.

They seem to have colonised the area around my house, leaving their tiffin tins on the steps out of the sun all morning then sitting on my roof to eat in the early afternoon, sometimes playing games in the yard outside my front door - all within the boundaries of my property and almost falling into my house in their revelries. I came home on Friday to find someone's motorbike parked outside my door with a big-boss builder contemplating the works from my roof. Saturday I went upstairs with my washing to find the plot owner was also up in my roof with his wife, son and mother. The big problem is that I have no contact with the landlord. The lease is held by another NGO who want to retain a space for their next volunteer and pay the rent. My NGO has no contact with the landlord and I have no way of finding out if he's given the builders permission to work from his property. Maybe I should just put a padlock on the gate to see if anyone complains? I suspect they'd just climb over the wall as I've seen them do several times to get to their building material compound - which just happens to be my yard. Grrrr!

Koraput changes

2009-12-16T20:28:00.000+05:30

At last, after 5 months in India I have my first visitor from home. Jon, my husband has braved the journey and arrived here on Saturday morning, staggering off the overnight train looking a bit bemused and crumpled after 48 hours of travelling. It's lovely to see him again after such a long time but I can't help feeling very apprehensive about how I'll feel when he leaves again. Miserable as sin I suspect! (that's a nice welcome for him isn't it?) The first time I have a visitor arriving is also the first time that I've managed to get sick since I've been here. It's really not fair. Maybe I'm getting a bit too blase about hygiene after 5 months of good health. The only food I ate for over 24 hours before it started had been cooked by myself so I can't even blame someone else's dodgy food.

J arrived here on the same day that my friend M left at the end of his assignment to return home to the UK. M had been expecting to travel back to Delhi by train, starting from Vizniagaram junction in Andhra Pradesh then on to Delhi via Bhubaneswar. Due to some civil unrest the director of his NGO decided that it would be safer for him to go to Bhuba by car so he duly spent half the night being ferried across the state in chauffeur-driven luxury in an effort to make sure he got his train connection to Delhi. M has been replaced by a married couple working at the same NGO who both seem really nice but it does mean that there are now 2 married couples and lonesome me here in remote Koraput. I need to get back to my Oriya books to try to acquire a bit more language, getting to know some local people would be easier if I could actually manage to talk to them.

Ants have invaded my house. I gave the place a thorough cleaning around 10 days ago on my first "rest" day for around 3 weeks - the dust was beginning to pile up and I thought I ought to do a bit of cleaning in honour of my visitor. A few days later I noticed some grains of red soil accumulated in a corner.

I followed the trail to find a rather magnificant architectural edifice comprising a tube which had been made with the soil combined with ant saliva, rapidly growing and running alongside the wall. The tube was filled with ants scurrying around carrying grains of soil to build their nest then filling it with their eggs. By the time I decided I'd better stop the colony from encircling the room (and my bed!) it was around 2 metres long. I'm now wondering how many millions of ants there are living in the mortar and brickwork underneath my house, burrowing their way through and carrying segments off to make homes elsewhere.

I'm curious about the house that's growing in the plot next door to mine. I had been a bit put out by the close proximity of the new building as my windows now look out onto a blank brick wall about a metre away, blocking out most of my natural daylight. It does however bring the advantage of cutting out most of the sun which helps to keep it cooler and for me, that has to be an advantage. The thing that is really intriguing me is the building technique. This photo is taken from my roof, looking down into the plot onto the internal walls. The bricks were laid, the door and window holes roughly framed with bamboo poles and a layer of what looked like ordinary local soil laid over the top. After that, a layer of cement was added followed by a metal frame which was used to build a concrete beam along the top of the walls, windows and doors. I suspect that is how my house was built as well. The site is staffed by a couple of (male) brickies and up to half a dozen women doing the heavy digging, lifting and mortar mixing work. Somehow these women manage to look elegant while carrying great pans of mortar or a dozen bricks on their heads, saris carefully folded around them and sometimes wearing flowers in their hair. They have colonised the steps up onto my roof, keeping their tiffin tins with their lunch on there and out of the sun during the morning and sitting on my roof to eat their lunch in the early hours of the afternoon. So much for being able to use a private roof space for hanging out my newly washed underwear to dry in the sun. It risks being splattered with mortar which they carry up onto my roof to lay. At least they sound cheerful while they work, the place is constantly filled with peals of laughter.

Power cuts are a regular occurrence here in Koraput but have been particularly bad over the last couple of weeks due to a faulty transformer. The town has been sharing a single transformer since the pair blew with different parts of town alternating supply, 2 hours on and 2 hours off. It gets to be quite a challenge to work out when there will be supply to recharge batteries and refill water tanks. I had been told that the transformer was due to be replaced on Tuesday but we still had a lengthy power cut this morning, Wednesday. Maybe tomorrow?

Portraits of a society part 3

2009-12-03T22:19:00.000+05:30

Adivasis frequently live in remote and inhospitable areas such as hills and forests, suffer poor health due to disease and malnutrition, have little or no formal education leading to low literacy levels, use a low level of technology and have a distinctive culture and language. Many have a culture of nurturing the land that they live from, e.g. finding ways to use forest products that do not result in the loss of the trees (my non-timber forest-product house brush is one example, the leaf plates - totally biodegradable - is another).

There is some indication that they have little contact with people from outside their communities but all the Adivasi that I have met have made me feel very welcome, despite my inability to speak any of their language. Gatherings of people representing these communities are a valuable way of them sharing their concerns, experiences and ideas and to have a much-needed celebration of their culture. The short time that I have spent working in this community has made me wonder if these people have got it right. They lack formal education opportunities and the ability to read and write is essential in many parts of the world and can lead to so much other learning. Many suffer from malnutrition, starvation occurs, serious and preventable health problems are not uncommon and there are frequent reports of serious exploitation, abuse and even killing of tribal people. However they get (or provide) a different sort of education, learning how to live with and for the land and to leave little impact on the environment. Do they have a greater chance of surviving than those of us who are highly dependent on an oil-based economy, acquiring lots of material goods that we don't really need to survive, churn out carbon emissions, depending on others to supply us with our food and basic living needs and where harvesting a crop usually means destroying the plant that produced it?

I was told that this is a wine tree. A branch is cut and the sap seeps out of the cut end into a bowl suspended underneath the cut end. Or at least the bowl collects what the birds don’t get first. It does not seem to harm the tree, the wound heals and the tree and continues sprouting quite happily.

The trick to harvesting this ‘wine’ (which is not alcoholic) is shinning up a bamboo pole ladder to get to the source.

There were several nests woven high up in the branches. I've heard of weaver birds - wonder if these nests belong to them?

I think that this is a banyan tree with harvested paddy fields behind and cashew trees in the distance.

Village street.

Village water supply.

Street cleaning. It was one of the cleanest places that I've had the pleasure of visiting.

It’s a good idea to part your vehicle in the shade.

Drying the laundry on the paddy sheaves.

Song & dance acts

2009-12-02T19:31:00.000+05:30

The Tribal Convention that I attended was for a serious reason. The people were gathering to discuss their issues and what they were doing about them or what they wanted to do about them. However, it's also a good opportunity to have a bit of a celebration; there's nothing like a good get-together for making some entertainment. Adivasi entertainment is fun. It can be very noisy, sometimes a little disconcerting like when I found myself whisked up in the middle of a group of ladies dancing their way across to lunch but we all had a good time.

Adivasis have talent, everyone joined in the singing (except for me, all I could do was clap along to the rhythm when I wasn't using my camera)

Portraits of a society part 2

2009-12-02T06:49:00.002+05:30

Adivasis are the indigenous population of India; i.e.the original inhabitants of the land. They form a substantial minority of the Indian population at around 8% of the total population (around 68 million people) and around 50% of the Koraput district population. The Indian Constitution uses the term Scheduled Tribes as an administrative term to 'administer constitutional privileges, protection and benefits for peoples considered historically disadvantaged and backward'. Not all Adivisis are classified as Scheduled Tribes. The Constitution offers great protection and privelages to all the people of India but sadly the practice of administering people's rights is not so good.

In 1793 the British introduced the "Zamindari system that conferred control over vast territories, including Adivasi territories, to designated feudal lords for the purpose of revenue collection by the British. This drastically commenced the forced restructuring of the relationship of Adivasis to their territories as well as the power relationship between Adivasis and 'others'. The predominant external caste-based religion sanctioned and practiced a rigid and highly discriminatory hierarchical ordering with a strong cultural mooring". (A History of Discrimination, Conflict, and Resistance by C.R. Bijoy, Core Committee of the All India Coordinating Forum of Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples

http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/2003/adivasi.htm).

Historically, the Adivasi people did not own land individually but had territorial land that was used by many generations of the tribal community which ensured that the land remained in the control of the tribe rather than individuals. The introduction of the Zamandiri system meant that the land that they lived on and from was taken out of their control and they lost their means to survive, leaving them low in the social hiearchy. Subsequent developments such as the creation of large dams to form reservoirs resulted in further displacement of these people and disruption of their irrigations sytems, building large factories (that offer little employment to local people) on huge plots of land, mining bauxite (which not only displaces people but removes a valuable land resource as bauxite acts like a sponge, soaking up water during monsoon season for retention and life-support system for plants during the dry months) have added to the problems faced by many of the Adivisi communities.

This is not a political or activist blog but I could write pages and pages about the problems and discrimination that are faced by these people. They have huge problems that I am only just starting to comprehend. There are many activists and NGOs such as SPREAD are trying to address their problems but it takes time and resources to get anywhere. There are many very good blogs posted by activists who know far more about the Adivasi people and the problems they face than I do if you are interested and want to find out more.

There were loads of kids at the Tribal Convention - none of this leaving them at home for someone else to look after nonsense so often seen in many other countries. They form a valued part of the society and seem to be welcomed everywhere.

Portraits of a society part 1

2009-12-01T07:33:00.001+05:30

Here are just a few of the adivasi (tribal) people I met at the Tribal Convention at the weekend. They were all there for a good reason - talking about the issues being faced in different blocks (political divisions of the area), what they are doing or tryuing to do about them and also to celebrate their culture and way of life. It's rare that I've had the privelage of meeting so many people, unable to speak each other's languages but who have still made me feel so welcome and part of their society, if only very briefly for a couple of days. I was wandering round in my salwar kameez, enjoying the cooler air that we are having now here in Koraput. However, if you have been brought up in the Indian climate and accustomed to much warmer temperatures, you feel the cold. It was only when it came to trying to sleep in a village house that I felt a bit chilly. At least my house didn't have the big mouses that my colleague told me about in the house that he had to sleep in!

Harvesting the paddy

2009-11-30T13:41:00.000+05:30

Sunday picnic

2009-11-29T19:49:00.002+05:30

I spent a couple of days at a Tribal Convention organised by SPREAD for the adivasis (tribal people) to give them the chance to talk about their issues, what they are doing about them and perhaps more importantly to celebrate their culture. When you have a big group of people gathering, food is very important. I hung over the cooks while they were preparing the food, a mixed veg curry, dali and rice.

First prepare your vegetables.

Make sure that the cauliflower is chopped into florets so that all veg is a similar size.

Put the prepared vegetables to one side.

Put a little oil into a pan.

First fry your onions until brown.

Add a little chopped garlic

and crushed ginger and fry until slightly browned.

Add a little ready prepared spice.

Then add the prepared vegetables and 2 measures of split peas.

Add salt to taste

Add a little water and stir well.

Leave to simmer for several hours, adjusting the temperature if necessary.

Take care to use an oven glove to prevent you from burning yourself.

Prepare the rice

and serve on disposable plates.

Back from Delhi

2009-11-27T18:45:00.001+05:30

I had a trip to Delhi this week, only the second time I've been out of Koraput since I arrived here in August. I went to a VSO conference to discuss ongoing VSO strategy but it was great to be able to meet most of the other volunteers, many of whom I only new by name and email, catch up with some of the people who arrived in India at the same time as me and to meet the new group of volunteers who are currently attending the in-country orientation.

It was lovely to meet everyone and spend a few days comparing notes, enjoying luxuries like hot showers and having food cooked for us. The trouble with Koraput is that it's such a long way from anywhere it's easy to feel pretty isolated but getting together with other volunteers occasionally helps to remind me that I'm not alone. It also gave me the opportunity to do a bit of shopping and buy a few essentials, like more malaria tablets. soya sauce, decent vinegar to replace the stuff on my shelf mouthwateringly described as "glacial acetic acid" (sounds delicious doesn't it?). Oh, an copious supplies of toilet paper as my local supplier had failed to make the promised delivery materialise.

The conference was really interesting and came up with some scary statistics. Some of them I'd heard or read before but it is good to be reminded of the reason we are working in India.

The Indian government spends around 1% GDP on public healthcare. Compare that to around 5% spent by the US or over 8% spent by the UK.
28% of the Indian population are officially below the poverty line (total population over 1.1bn)
80% of Indians live on less than 20 rupees per day
35-40% of Indians can't read or write
50% of Indians are less than 25 years old and many are disconnected with the realities of the country and unaware of the issues faced by large sectors of the population. There are also many who are passionate about doing what they can to improve things in India - part of our discussions revolved around what VSO can do to encourage and support youth volunteers, using their energy and innovation to address some of the issues here in India.

There were many more statistics and we had some inspirational speakers and it was a privelage to be able to listen to some of them and take part in the discussions.

The journey to Delhi was a long one. 15 hours on the overnight train from Koraput to Bhubaneswar, a couple of hours waiting for the train to Delhi, arriving around 24 hours later, getting to the VSO office around midday Monday feeling distinctly crumpled and somewhat smelly wearing the same clothes I'd put on Saturday morning. I was in 3 berth sleeper coaches, allocated to the bottom tier. The guy in the middle tier was obviously tired and asked me if he could make up his bed during the afternoon. It didn't feel right to say no, he looked so shattered but this meant that the back of the bottom tier was raised to become the bed of the middle and I was hunched up underneath, unable to sit properly for the rest of the day and my back started to seize up into an attractive, uncomfortable hump.

Later in the evening, a man asked me if I'd mind moving to the adjacent coach so that he and his wife could both be in the section that I was in with the rest of their family. This was no problem for me as I was travelling alone and it did at least mean I might be able to sit up properly. The man's companion grabbed my bag and carried it through to the next coach and then demanded baksheesh from me. I don't mind tipping staff on trains and in restaurants if they've done a good job but didn't feel much inclined to pay out any money when it wasn't me that wanted to move. A bit of an argument ensued but the 7 young men in my new section of coach came to my aid and saw him off. Unfortunately one of them rather spoiled my gratitude by dropping a rather large backpack off the top tier which came crashing down on my head. A good aid to an already aching neck and shoulders.

The trip home was easier as I flew back to make sure I got to Koraput on time to set out on a field trip on Saturday. Unfortunately this meant I had to get up at 4am to get a taxi to the airport for my early morning flight. Another taxi was waiting for me at Vishakapatnam airport, sent by my NGO to whisk me back to Koraput, only 4 hours away. It was probably pretty easy for him to spot me and M, the only 2 white women coming out of the airport but he carried a sign so that we could spot him among all the other waiting drivers. I've seen a few variations of the spelling of my name but this was the first time I'd come across this one: "Hellary". I'm not convinced it will catch on.

A tale of two more children

2009-11-21T11:48:00.004+05:30

This lad has locomotor disabilities, his club feet making walking almost impossible and clawed hands preventing him from grasping and holding things. He needs surgery. He is only 4 years old, a good age for surgical procedures to start as his health is reasonable and he is young enough to learn to walk and use his hands.
SPREAD has been working with his parents who were not fully aware of what could be done to support him and improve his chances in life. Their support worker has explained the process for getting the treatment he needs so badly, giving them moral and practical support advising them of their rights, to get to medical centres, helping them to fill out forms, translating at the surgeries and advocating the rights of the child. He has a good chance if he can get the surgery he needs but there is still the problem of finding the funds needed to get him through all the treatment.

This girl is blind. She was born with cataracts. Her family were devastated and their first instinct was to feel that she was no good, adding to the burden of their already tough lives. The family has been given lots of support and advice by their support worker to help them come to terms with their changed lives. The girl has been given therapy and learning materials to help her develop and assistance to get the health check-ups and health-care she needs to stay healthy and attain a reasonable quality of life. She's now a valued member of the family and enjoying life.

A beautiful couple

2009-11-21T11:21:00.002+05:30

I want to tell you about a couple that I met on my visit to the SPREAD project with people with disabilities, somewhere out in the field near the border with the state of Chattisgarh. They were a striking looking couple, full of smiles and looking after a couple of the children who had come to the meeting.

Both the man and the woman are mentally impaired, have locomotor disabilities and problems with their hearing and speech.

SPREAD has been helping them attain their legal rights and providing them with vocational training. They now earn income through activities such as leaf plate making using forest products. These plates are commonly used in this part of India, providing a cheap and clean way to serve food, completely disposable and biodegradeable and more important (for me, anyway!) - no washing up!

A tale of three children

2009-11-21T10:50:00.001+05:30

There seems to be a high incidence of cerebral palsy (CP) here in this part of India compared to the UK. I don't have the statistics for this area - this will be gathered sometime but is not yet availalbe - but seems to be higher than normal. I can only guess why - it could be malnutrition during pregnancy, little or no medical support during childbirth, early motherhood - plus plain statistical risk.
CP comes in many different forms and levels of disability, from very mild through to very severe. It can affect motor control, cause paralysis, problems with hearing and sight and a variety of other problems. It can affect people's quality of life and may reduce life expectancy in the more severe cases.

This lad - who does have a name but I don't want to invade his privacy any more than I already am - is 5 years old and lives with his parents. He has little motor control in is left side, his limbs flailing when he tried to do things. SPREAD made a frame to go round a large piece of paper, with lots of coaxing and practice he learned to keep his drawing inside the box. The box was then made smaller and smaller until he had a box only a a few centimetres wide. It's helped him to improve his motor control and his ability to do basic survival techniques like feeding himself. He is now learning to read and write.

This lad has CP and is quadriplegic. He has spasticity in his hands and couldn't hold a pencil. SPREAD has been working with him, doing simple things like adapting his pencil by wrapping it in cloth to make it big enough for him to hold and giving him lots of support and encouragement. He now goes to school and is learning alongside other children without disabilities.

This girl is 12 years old. She has CP, is quadriplegic and has problems with sight and speech. She is being helped to learn some basic activities to help her look after herself. She can now sign her name and do some basic calculations. She seemed to be really enjoying herself and was playing hide and seek with me and my camera.

Much of the work that SPREAD does with children with disability is educating the parents as much as the children, trying to help them come to terms with having a disabled child in their family. Advice, guidance and practical support is provided to help them claim any legal entitlements to education, health and food support from the government. It's hard to find out what you are entitled to if you are unaware of your rights, can't read, can't write, can't sign your name and can't afford the fare to get to the official offices. Support workers will accompany them to see officials and to courts, providing advocacy and encouragement, helping them with the forms and translating for them as most only speak their tribal language.

Along with this goes the all-important moral support needed to help parents anywhere in the world to come to terms with having a child with disabilities, helping them to see the value in getting their child an appropriate education and aids to living a reasonable life.

It put a few things into perspective for me when I met these people.

A day at the office

2009-11-19T09:47:00.001+05:30

This week has been an interesting one in Koraput. The parab (festival) started on Monday for 3 days this week. The parab is a celebration of culures from across India with stalls selling crafts (many produced by self-help groups), promoting the work of NGOs and singing, dancing and music going on into the night. In fact all through the night. Loudly. It was held at The Stadium here in Koraput, a large playing field that is usually used for playing football and other athletic activities, seen here from my roof. It's only about 5 minutes walk from my house so the activities were very audible at home. My friend and fellow VSO volunteer J came to stay with me for a few days from Kolkata. J spent 2 years working in Koraput and decided to escape the noise and bustle of Kolkata to the rural tranquility of Koraput. She was sadly mistaken. We did not get much sleep.

A group of Scandinavian ambassadors visited Koraput, partly to see this part of the country and the problems that are hard to appreciate when reading about them and also to visit the parab. They joined us in our office yesterday afternoon for a presentation of SPREAD's work partly funded by one of these nations and to discuss what is being done to address the issues faced by the tribal communities to gain a better understanding. I've never been given ambassador's calling cards before.

The session seemed to go very well, generating some interesting questions and discussions.

The only problem with this sort of visitor is that they come accompanied by large groups of security personnel, not often seen here in Koraput.

Relaxing after the visitors had moved on

A pictorial entry

2009-11-16T15:40:00.000+05:30

Gopal, one of the field-workers, in his home

Rama checking in the meeting attendees

A wonderfully expressive face. He looked really at peace

Isn't she beautiful?

Cha wallah - he made very very good cha

Rice grain being carried off the paddy fields. It looks heavy but he was almost running down the track

Cows, sheep & goats complete with herders

Papaya

Friends

Another project meeting

2009-11-15T19:41:00.002+05:30

I had the privelage of going out to a tribal village with my NGO to attend a project meeting out in the field recently. We left Koraput early on Friday morning and travelled around 3 hours by car to get to a tiny village called Kaliejodi. , somewhere near the slightly larger village of Ramagiri I was interested to see the way that my NGO is running the project, working on CBR (community based rehabilitation) for people with disability but my official role during this visit was photographer, to try to capture some decent images of people and project work for future use. No pressure there then! I took hundreds of photos and now have the task of sifting through them to look for the more memorable ones. This task is not aided by the daily power cuts we are getting here now to conserve electricity but at least my laptop survives on the battery for a while. I'll be writing more posts on the people later.
I was made very welcome by the staff on the project who all managed to find a way of communicating despite the language barrier. Many of them don't speak Oriya anyway but a local tribal dialect, just to add to my confusion.

The village is very remote, much of the journey was spent weaving out way along a dirt track through the forest, stopping for about 10 minutes at one point while road builders created new track in front of us. Many of these people are employed under the NREGA scheme - national rural employment gaurantee scheme, an act designed to ensure that rural people are guaranteed 100 days work a year.

Amongst the attendees were people like Malati. Malati is a tribal woman who is a highly respected leader, unafraid to speak out her mind and fight for her rights and those of her community. She went with my boss to a Human Rights Commission conference recently in Rajasthan, selected as a representative of the tribal people for her articulacy and ability to stand up in front of anyone to express her feelings.

The meeting was held outside under a tree for some shade. Most of the attendees had to walk or cycle many kilometres to get there, a journey made harder by the disabilities that many of them suffer. Not all the participants were not on the invitation list.

I really liked the way that the meeting was managed. The project coordinators and community activators worked with the participants to try to get them to express more about their lives - the satisfactions and the dissatisfactions - in other words, what they liked and found good and what they found hard to deal with and need some help to improve. The harder part was then getting them to start prioritising what needed to be addressed first but good progress was made.

A good meal was served at lunch and again in the evening, all part of making sure everyone was looked after and made to feel welcome - and to try to encourage them to attend more meetings in the future.

I was so stuffed after my huge dinner of rice, dali and vegetable curry that I had to go for a walk to try to shake it down a bit. I'm a keen camper back in the UK and like to stay in places that are remote and isolated. This was something else. The village has no electricity or sanitation (don't ask, I'm not putting that sort of detail into my blog).

The lack of electricity is not great for the community especially as Orissa has a surplus of electicity generated by the huge dams on the nearby rivers - that displaced many of the tribals. However, for me it was wonderful. My village at home has no street lights so I am lucky enough to have a good night sky view. This was something else. I could see the bands of the Milky Way, I had a brilliant view of the Leonid Meteorites and to cap it all, there were fireflies darting around the place. Magic. It was so lovely that I jumped at the chance to sleep outside under the stars (until the 4am cock crowing).

I was whisked off on the back of a motorbike at 7 the next morning to go and visit a couple of families nearby. First stop was Malati's house, all looking very spick and span and colourful to have a cup of really good cha.

Then off we went to try to locate another family and at around 8 we came to a school with a bunch of kids waiting outside. I was told they'd arrived at 6 for lessons and had been waiting ever since for their teacher to arrive. I wonder what schoolkids in the UK would make of that?

While I was chatting to the kids (well - showing them the photos and trying to sign to them) a man working nearby gestured to me to take his photo. He was delighted with the result, leaping up and down with great whoops of laughter

On the way back to the field office we went past lakes filled with pink water lilies - lotus flowers. It looked magical.

Success!

2009-11-08T09:45:00.000+05:30

I had a leaky tap in my house. It started off 2-3 months ago with a slight drip which gradually got worse, turning into a steady stream of water coming from the tap. I reported this to my NGO and Dusmant organised a plumber to come to my house to fix it. That was the first problem I live in a house with no name. It is on a street with no name. Organising anyone to come to the place is awkward, to say the least.

The first arrangement was for 8:30 Saturday morning. I'd been told to take a day's leave on Saturday to make up for one of the festival holidays on which I'd worked to meet my deadline for finishing my manuals so there was no problem with me hanging around waiting at the house for a couple of hours. I waited until around 10 when Dusmant called me to say that the plumber had called and I wasn't there. I can only assume he called at the wrong house.

A new appointment for 8:30 on Sunday morning was arranged and along came the plumber, accompanied by Karna for directions and some translation. I assumed that he would isolate the tap, turning off the water supply before dismantling it to get to the washer. No. Tap removed, water squirted everywhere - up the walls, out of the window, over the floor and all over the plumber and Karna who was cracking up laughing while he shoved his hand over the outlet to try to stem the flow. But my tap is fixed and he also sorted out the leaky tap in the bathroom which poured water out between all the joints as well as the tap outlet when I turn it on so I'm happy, even if I do have a big puddle on the floor.

The most exciting thing this week has been the completion of my manuals. I had submitted the procurement and HR documents about a week ago and managed to finish the finance one on Thursday. Dusmant promised me immediately that he would follow it but there are bound to be a few things that need refining or even a radical rewrite if they prove unworkable for the NGO environment. Writing procedures that work well in a commercial environment complete with sophisticated systems to capture information and suppliers that provide official printed receipts for every purchase is one thing. Writing procedures for field-workers that have to buy fuel from a guy who fills up his mobile tanker at one of the bigger towns to take into the interior to as there are no filling stations for miles around is something different. Many of these traders are unlicenced, providing a much-needed service for the community but not able or willing to give out receipts. What do auditors here make of books showing that x thousand rupees have been spent on fuel without any proof of purchase? We will see.

The field workers here do a fantastic job. They work closely with the community in their project districts, advising and supporting them to achieve what they are entitled to get under Indian law, helping tribal people to reclaim land taken from them, helping kids get to school, helping people to get the health care they need, supporting the set-up of self-help groups, installing grain banks in villages where there is risk of malnutrition and starvation - should they also have the hassle of having to drive 80 kilometres (and back) to get to the nearest official filling station to refill their vehicle so they can submit their claim with a printed receipt? I don't think so. We've had to devise procedures that I hope will satisfy auditors and funding agencies but don't intefere with the work that's being done.

I just hope that my solutions are accepted and we can start trialling things - that's when the hard work will really start, trying to make sure that people follow the documented procedure. It's sometimes easier not to have documentation then noone can point out that you don't do what you say you do!

At last!

2009-11-04T11:38:00.000+05:30

I had a very mixed day yesterday. I'm close to reaching another of my milestones, the completion of the manual of finance policies and procedures. I'd like to say it's been a labour of love but to be honest, it's just felt like hard labour. But all being well, I'll be able to get it sent off to the boss over the next day or two for his approval before it's shipped out to be scrutinised by chartered accountants. Then I'll be moving on to my next challenge - whatever that turns out to be.

My cellphone died on me on Monday having run out of credit so another trip into town last night to top it up. First I wanted to get some more cash from the ATM but it didn't want to let me have any. The ATM dialogue is different to the machines back at home and most of them use touch screens not buttons which always confuses me as the keypads are the same as the UK ones so I keep pressing the Enter buttons which don't work. After several attempts to extract money with a group of tall Indian men crowding round me watching every move and telling me what to do, I gave up as I was a bit worried about them watching me key in my PIN and walk out with a wad of cash (I was still hopeful). I have never felt threatened in any way here in Koraput but I don't like people peering at me keying in my PIN number!

Off I went to Ramesh and paid over my last bit of cash to get my phone working again then on to another ATM that's less crowded as it's about a mile's walk out of town. Success there. On my way back home from there I decided to drop in at the Spoken English Institute, a place I'd been taken to a couple of weeks ago by a neighbour Binu, a 19 year old young woman studying English and commerce. Binod, the tutor was very pleased to see me and introduced me to his students as their new tutor and told me to take the class. After my initial horror at the thought of taking a class of teenagers I had great fun talking to them and getting a bit of banter going backwards and forwards. And I got a cup of tea out of it! However, by the time I got home it was late and I was too tired to cook so just had a banana and went to bed,

I have to go to Delhi again later this month to attend a VSO workshop. I'm travelling there by train but flying back as I have a trip out into the field at the weekend. The most direct train route from Rayagada to Delhi (only 31 hours, no changes) was fully booked so I have to go from Koraput to Bhubaneswar (14.5 hours) then on to Delhi from Bhuba (a mere 23 hours - which is strange as I'm sure it was 25 hours when I did the reverse of that journey). So I leave Koraput at around 6:30pm on Saturday and arrive in Delhi at around 10:30 Monday. I'll be shattered. The flight back will only take a couple of hours but it's scheduled to leave at 05:55 - what time will I have to get up!

Booking the tickets was painful. I'm limited to a dial-up mobile modem device which is OK but has limited bandwidth and temperamental coverage. It can slow down a lot when there's lots of cellphone traffic but it's been terrible over the last few days. I went to see Ramesh, the supplier a few days ago and he told me that someone had hammered something and broken it. I know the feeling, I frequently want to take a hammer to it. Unfortunately, living out here in a remote rural area, it can take ages to get replacement parts or specialist repair tools. It took me well over 2 hours to book the train tickets, not helped by the train I really wanted to get being fully booked already. Then came the trauma of the Air India site to book those tickets. An hour and a half later I gave up, slammed my laptop shut and stomped home. Fortunately my wonderful, long-suffering husband somehow picked up the vibes emanating from me and offered to book it for me with the benefit of broadband. Even that was difficult but at least he was able to see that the Air India site was down, it wasn't just my rubbish internet connection. So after about half a day of battling with various computers, I'm now in possession of 3 tickets to ride. Next problem will be printing them but I think I need a rest from battles today.

Some success

2009-10-31T18:51:00.000+05:30

At last - I have received my some mail from the UK. Still no sign of any of the parcels posted by my husband from around 26th August but at least my Guardian Weekly has started to arrive. So far, I've had 2 deliveries, each of 2 papers. The first delivery last Saturday was for weeks 25/09-01/10 and 9-15/10, today's delivery was for 02-09/10 and 15-22/10. Not in quite the order that I'd anticipated but I'm very nearly up to date (or I will be when I've read them). It's been a real pleasure to be able to catch up with a version of my favourite paper. I'm not convinced I'll ever see my parcels but I can hope.

I have at last had some achievements at work. My procurement policies and procedures have got past the accountant's eagle eyes with just a few adjustments to the form layouts which didn't take long to do. At last! All I have to do now is get the acceptance of our boss, the external accountant and the board. It's a minor detail but it's given my spirits a huge lift to have achieved this small but significant milestone. And that's not all. I have acceptance of the majority of the draft HR manual, there are just a few questions on policies and procedures that had not been thought about before. Now that's a real achievement, it's the biggest and hardest chunk of work I've done so far, I'm no HR expert. Hurrah and thanks to my friends who are HR experts and helped me with this!

Every day as I walk to and from the office, people stop to talk to me. I often see students coming and going from their accommodation and know many of them by sight now. One of them introduced himself a few days ago and told me he was a student at the Talent College here in Kopaput. I asked him what he was studying and his response was "talent". There's another bunch of students I often chat to who, these are student nurses. They always wave to me from their hostel when I go past, one of them walking along the road with me pointed to one of the waving women and said "that's my Madam". I really need to learn more Oriya, sometimes things get lost in translation.

The paddy fields that I walk past every day on my way to and from work are being harvested. It all looks really hard work. I'm sure they are more able to cope with the heat than I am but it's so labour intensive, no machinery used at all. When we first arrived in August they were planting it, by hand. They are now cutting it, by hand. Gathering it into bundles and carrying across the fields to the road, by hand. Then lifting it onto carts, by hand. No doubt it will all be threshed by hand as well. And I buy it for 20 rupees a kilo in the markets here. I am constantly amazed at the weights that the women can carry on their heads, huge bundles of still green rice plants complete with seed heads must be pretty heavy (I have seen as many as 12 bricks being carried on one head). Today I saw a woman walking home from working in the fields carrying her scythe that she'd been using to cut the stems, the curved blade draped over the curve of her head.

The women doing the cutting are just about visible above the seed heads, it looks back-breaking work constantly bending over to cut the stems.

Picking their way back across the field for their lunch break, the field is still flooded and most of them have bare feet.

The stooks of rice stacked along the side of the harvested field, waiting to be taken out to the road.

Bundles of rice waiting to be taken away for threshing.

Karthika

2009-10-29T07:06:00.000+05:30

It's Kartik or Karthika masa (month) at the moment, theholiest month for Hindus and devotees worship Lord Shiva to the utmost. During Karthika masa, women wake up early and have a ceremonial or spiritual bath and perform "Lord Shiva Puja". Every day, women decorate their house entrances with lighted diyas, devotees believe that performing or observing fast and pujas during the month can bring them salvation after death. I hear several of my neighbours praying and singing very early in the morning and the smell of incense wafts in through the windows. My mission over the next few days is to go to the Jagannath Temple here in Koraput to observe the worship and festivities there. I would love to take some photos as the women are dressed in their best, most beautiful and colourful saris as it is such an auspicious month but will feel a bit conspicuous going there with my camera to stare and 'capture the moment'. I will need to find a local person happy and willing to escort me there to explain a bit about the rituals.

SPREAD bought 2 new motorbikes recently, needed for one of the projects currently in progress. There is a Hindu custom to perform a puja on new motor vehicles to bring them luck and make them safe from accidents. This seems to involve cleaning them then decorating them with flowers and symbols using turmeric and other brightly coloured dyes, performing arati (showing a flame) using burning incense sticks while offering prayers. (Apologies to any readers who understand more about the details and spot my mistakes, I'm still trying to understand the culture and faith).

A priest from a nearby temple performed the puja on the bikes then came into the office to offer prayers in there as well, scattering turmeric-stained rice over anyone or anything that he found on the way. This is me, post puja with auspicious rice grains sprinkled on my head. I was a little worried when I found out about the puja as I had already had a couple of pillion rides on one of the bikes the day before the puja. Fortunately I lived to tell the tale.

This is the liquor store in town where bottles of beer and other noxious substances are furtively wrapped in newspaper and handed out through the small gaps in the bars. I don't drink much alcohol, maybe a can a week with friends but I feel like some sort of criminal when I go up the steps to the shop and can't help looking round wondering who's watching and stuffing any purchases deep into my backpack out of sight. Drinking is frowned on by many people - probably with very good reason with the problems that can occur with overindulgence and some very poor people using what little cash they have buying alcohol rather than food or medicine for their family. As for women buying drinks - I suspect that us westerners are the only women that do it.

Some success at last

2009-10-25T20:35:00.000+05:30

I finally managed to get an ATM card to go with my new Indian bank about 10 days ago. The trouble was (as I found out after several failed attempts to withdraw money) that I had to go to an Andhra Bank ATM for the first use to activate it. The nearest one to Koraput is in Jeypore, about an hours bus ride away. No matter, off I went on Saturday afternoon, taking the afternoon off to go and sort it out. It's a nice ride over the hills and down into Jeypore although the bus is always crowded. At least I managed to get a seat this time and spent half the journey being chatted up by the conductor, a young man around the same age as my son + a bunch of teenage engineering students, all keen to test out their English and finding my pitiful Oriya attempts very amusing. I even got the conductors phone number thrust into my hands with the pledge that I can call him any time of the day and night if I need any help. Now there's an offer. I managed to find the Andhra Bank without too much hunting and was amazed to find the my card worked fine and issued all the cash requested. Another tick to go onto my list of things to sort out.

While in Jeypore I decided to do a bit of shopping, the shops there are bigger and better stocked and have things not available in Koraput. I was really pleased to find a pan shop that had a kettle (or kettlie as he called it). Up till now I've had to boil my water in an open pan (pans don't seem to have lids here, I use a metal plate across the top as a lid). I haven't been enjoying my tea since I got here, it just hasn't tasted right but every cup I've made using the kettle has been really nice. Coincidence or psychological I wonder? But a second tick on my list of things to do.

Today I went down into Koraput to go to the market for my weekly veg shopping. On the way I spotted a shop I hadn't seen before selling furniture. Since I arrived I've been hoping to find something more comfortable to sit on than the ubiquitous plastic chairs. I have got a cushion and pillow to try to make it slightly more comfortable but it's hardly luxurious and my back's been aching a bit. I've been looking for cane furniture which I thought would be cheap and looks really nice. I'd been told that I wouldn't be able to get cane chairs here until the tribal convention in November and had resigned myself to waiting until then. But hey presto, I found a shop that sold exactly what I've been looking for today and at a very good price. So I now have a 3 piece suite - all I need now is friends and family to come and make use of it! So that's another tick on my list.

I was slightly disturbed a couple of days ago when I returned home from work to find that my resident birds nest has moved. Those of you who have been following my blog may remember that I posted a photo of said nest on my Diwali blog. It's moved about 6 inches to the left and is now on the opposite side of the recess. Has it come to life? Is it actually some mysterious creature hibernating up there? It must be about 12 feet up and I can't find anything tall enought to stand on to look at it more closely. I might not like what I find anyway so maybe it's a good thing.

On a more serious note, I think I may finally be making some headway at work. My first objective is to write policies and procedures for the NGO and then to make sure that everyone follows the procedures. They will love me, introducing formalities and red tape. To achieve writing said policies I need to be working quite closely with the accountant and other people in the NGO - which is fine, as a volunteer that is what I should be doing to help them to grow their skills. However, I sometimes think that I'm viewed a bit like an auditor as I have had to look very critically at the way that they work and assess if that's an efficient/transparent/accountable way of working that would stand up to audit. Noone likes working with auditors (apologies to any of you who are auditors) and none of us likes to feel that our work is being criticised. It's sometimes felt a bit of an uphill struggle to get the time I need from my local colleagues. However, I think I'm really making some progress and was really pleased to be able to pass a draft copy of the procurement policy to the accountant for his feedback and next to go willl be HR, an ominously long document as it includes lots of template letters, forms, health and safety, disability policy and a host of things that will probably never need to be used but need to be there. I think the likelihood of needing to follow a disciplinary or grievance procedure is fairly remote but it needs to be included for completeness. Then I'll have to return to the really hard stuff, the accounting procedures and the monitoring and evaluation stuff. I'll get there eventually. Writing policies and procedures is not the most riveting of pastimes but it's really important stuff. Many NGOs operate very effectively without any of the formalities that are deemed essential in the corporate environment. However, that may result in a lack of transparency and accountability that is essential for the donors to be able to have confidence that their sponsorship is being spent effectively and appropriately. It would be really nice if I could finish the job and see that some of the working practices have improved and the red tape part of my colleagues job is made easier by having a methodical procedure to follow instead of trying to work out what to do every time. I will live in hope but it's given a huge boost to my morale just to get nods of appreciation when I talked the accountant through my draft. Let's hope I can continue on the road to success.

Bikes

2009-10-22T21:03:00.000+05:30

There are very few cars here in Koraput. Most people walk to wherever they need to go and there are many motorbikes and bicycles. I spotted a small boy on a very big pushbike a few days ago and wished I'd had my camera to hand. He was probably around 7-8 years old and was riding a large, adult sized bike with a crossbar. His legs were too short for him to be able to sit on the seat and reach the pedals - I reckon his feet would have been suspended about a foot above the pedals. So how was he riding it? His left foot was on the left pedal, as you might expect. His right leg was thrust underneath the crossbar, through the frame to the reach right pedal at a sideways angle. He was leaning his body out around 45 degrees to the left and had the bike at a similar angle leaning to the right to counterbalance his weight. He was bombing at full speed down the hills, weaving round the holes, dogs, cows and people then pumping away at the pedals to ride up the hill on the other side of the stream. Who said you need to make sure your bike is the right size?

A few days later I saw a man on a bike carrying a second full-size bike. He was slowly pedalling along the same road where I'd seen the boy with the spare bike strapped sideways onto the back of his bike, making his load as wide as the rickshaws also weaving through the road users. I must learn to carry my camera with me at all times.

Deepavali

2009-10-18T20:53:00.008+05:30

Deepavali or Diwali or The Festival of Light or "celebration of the inner light" celebrations have been building up all week. Many shops close down for a couple of days before the day to have a thorough clean-up and repainting followed by decorating with flowers

Here's Amar's shop (the supplier of toilet tissue) with Amar walking away with a big grin on his face. Unfortunate spelling mistake in the floral sign but it didn't matter as everyone is just out to enjoy themselves.

Nearly all the shops put some sort of decoration up, it's a really important day here and seemed to be making everyone happy.

I was also invited to attend the third birthday celebration of the son of a work colleague, held at the Jaganath Temple here in Koraput. Diwali is a very auspicious day to be able to celebrate a bithday and the kids had a wonderful time racing round the safety of the temple without anyone worrying about motorbikes or rickshaws. The date of Diwali is decided by the lunar calendar so he won't be able to share his birthday with Diwali again for a while.
Many people draw Rangoli patterns on the ground outside their homes to encourage the goddess Lakshmi to enter their homes. These patterns are common here all the time as they are used to welcome guests into the home and are traditionally drawn using rice grains, sand or chalk but seem to have got bigger and more colourful over the Diwali season, I guess they need to be bright to attract Lakshmi.

Yesterday started with a bang, everyone seems to let off crackers and 'bombs' which went on very noisily all day and only seemed to quieten down around midnight. I was a little alarmed when I saw the fireworks on sale as they are not controlled like in UK, market stalls have open displays of their wares which seem to be sold to anyone who can pay. Kids love letting off crackers, making me jump every time. Many of the rockets don't seem to go up vertically but weave a horizontal path across the sky, sometimes landing worryingly close to our feet.

Most houses had lamps and candles lit up in the windows, on doorsteps, in gateways and rowed up along the walls around the roof. It looked wonderful in the evening. Some people use decorative electric lights like the Christmas lights at home but more common are the small clay pots filled with oil with diyas (cotton wicks) inserted. These are incredibly cheap, one of my colleagues got some for me at the grand total of 5 rupees for 15 pots. I then had the problem of working out which shop to go to to buy oil, deciding the easiest way of describing what I wanted was to take a pot with me to point at while asking for oil. I achieved success with buying castor oil (served in a flimsy plastic bag) and got very messy trying to make up my lamps, getting oil everywhere in the process. I managed to get some going but my attempts looked a bit pathetic compared to all my neighbours but I thought the house still looked good.

Some of my work colleagues arrived at home mid-morning to perform a Hindu house-warming ceremony and banish the evil spirits from the house. Prasant drew auspicious patterns on the wall with Turmeric, said prayers, split a coconut open, lit incense and scatter turmeric stained rice, leaves and water around the house and walls to make it safe. It felt a real honour and I hope that means that the leaks won't return at the next monsoon. For the house cleansing to work I had to leave the coconut water on the floor and the rice scattered. The only problem was that rice and broken coconut shell are not great under bare feet!

So that just leaves my birds nest to sort out. It was built in July but I don't think it was ever occupied. I'm not sure whether to leave it as a decoration or try to remove it as it looks a bit like a really bad wig sat on a high shelf. It will probably stay, I've got quite fond of it really and maybe the birds will return sometime to raise a family.

Builders

2009-10-14T14:35:00.000+05:30

The builders seem to have abandoned work on my house for now. Possibly forever, I don't know. They worked every day up to Dussera and one of them turned up every morning for a couple of weeks to flood the roof from the water tank up there to stop the new surface from drying too quickly and cracking but there's been no other work done. There are still half-built pillars on the roof that were supposed to protect the steel rods left exposed and there is one big wall that needs to be protected with rendering to stop it leaking in heavy rain. That's not a problem at the moment but it will become a problem again next monsoon. I've been told they are having trouble getting access to that wall because the neighbour doesn't want them on his land. Short of abseiling down from the roof the only way to access it would be from scaffolding in next doors garden.

In the meantime I still have builders rubble left on the roof and steps and don't feel much inclined to clear up until I'm sure they've finished. I'm actually quite relieved not to see them on scaffolding outside the house, it tends to look pretty precarious here. I walked past some newly erected scaffolding on my way home to lunch today, it is thick bamboo poles shoved into the ground for the uprights with slightly narrower (round) bamboo poles balanced across at intervals of around 5-6 cm for the platforms. No safety barriers and nothing to catch things dropped from a height. There was a builder nonchalently chucking mortar at the brick wall to build up a coat of rendering, most of it dropping straight off again down to the ground. I went past as quickly as possible,

There is a plot of land on the other side of my house that is now home to another group of builders. I have often seen the land-owner walking around this plot early in the morning and peering through my windows to have a chat with me. He came along while I was eating my lunch today to have a quick look at what was going on and as usual he wanted to know what I was eating and what I was reading. I'm not sure he understood my answer but I try to remain polite, it feels to me like an intrusion of privacy but I think to the locals it is a gesture of friendship and concern that we are eating enough. There does not seem to be a sense of personal space here, maybe it's a reflection on the starvation, poverty and cramped living conditions common here.

I also now have builders peering in to see what's going on in my humble abode. One started waving his mobile phone at me and like an idiot I thought he was trying to gesture that he wanted me to take his photo with his mobile. After a confused and confusing exchange of Pidgin English I realised he wanted to charge it. There are very few electrical sockets in this house, I guess most people here have very few gadgets and don't need the same number that we expect in Europe. One socket per room, all situated at shoulder-level next to the light switch, a good way of cutting down the electrical wiring requirements. It took me a while to work out where I could plug in my charger where he would be able to reach his phone from outside as of course I had to get back to work. We achieved it by putting it on a windowsill where he could reach it by climbing up onto the newly built wall, complete with wet mortar.

I'm a little worried about the effect that the new house will have on mine. One wall has no windows at all (the side with the neighbourly dispute) and the other side looks out onto the plot. I have a sneaking suspicion that the walls of the new house will end up about a metre from my windows and block out most of the light and give me a charming view. It also means that I won't get woken up by a cow poking her nose, chewing her cud and snorting through my window in the early hours of the morning, which may be a good thing.

Home luxuries

2009-10-13T07:11:00.001+05:30

Here in Koraput we live a very simple life. Entertainment opportunities are limited, to the best of my knowledge there is not even a cinema in the town - unusual in India where film is very popular. But it is very small, despite being the administrative centre for the surrounding Koraput district. The availability of different foods is also limited. It's unusual to transport food far (which is surely better for the planet?) and much of the fruit and veg sold in the market is grown locally and carried into town on the heads of the producers and sellers. It's a good time of year for harvest at the moment and there's a pretty good range of vegetables on the stalls, most of which looks wonderfully fresh.. I'm not so sure how good the variety will be as the seasons change. I am told that the range was very limited before the monsoon started, I suspect that that's when I'll really start craving favourite foods from home. At the moment, except for the occasional desire for something savoury like cheese, there's enough range of flavours in the local foods to keep me happy.

So what did my husband do after a meal with out good friends A and K at our home village last Saturday? Go to great lengths to describe the foods and wine. A is a great cook and also makes interesting wines. Some are pretty lethal and consumption shiuld be limited to small quantities but my favourite is her champagne which is pretty low alcohol while it's young. It seems that blackberry champagne was on supply on Saturday. As for the pudding, it's just not fair. There was a rice pudding that I endeavoured to eat with my fingers from a leaf plate still covered with curry, dahl and rice a couple of days ago which was an interesting experience, especially for my companions who were amused at my struggles. My other sweet intake has been minimal, limited to a fruit salad I made, some pancakes made by Carol on our first night here and a 'party cake' supplied by 'the best shop in Koraput'. Jon took great delight in describing the pudding - a long loaf made of chocolate about 5mm thick, then inside that it's been filled with frozen yoghurt flavoured with Tia Maria and crushed choclocate covered coffee beans, and every 2cm there is a layer of flaked chocolate, then another layer of frozen yoghurt. About 3 chocolate layes in all. Can someone snd one of these out to Koraput please?

Phew!

2009-10-12T20:43:00.001+05:30

I'm shattered. I've just finished my 8th consective day of work. This shouldn't be a really big deal, lots of people have to work many days without a break and probably for much longer hours than me. My excuse is that everything is more tiring for me here as it is still unfamiliar and I struggle with communications. Or maybe it's just old age setting in and getting to me?

Today was the third day of the team meeting. I can't imagine trying to organise a 3 day team meeting at anywhere I have worked in the UK but it's really worked here. Many of the team live in remote places and it takes so long to get here that meetings need to be spread ove several days to make the most out of getting everyone together in the same place at the same time. During the meeting each project team does a review of progress since the last meeting, plans for the next quarter, everyone gives feedback and reviews of any training received, hears about any plans for activities and initiatives plus a load of other things. I had to do a presentation of the workshop on local fundraising that I attended in Delhi in September. I was expecting it to take around a couple of hours but it ended up taking over 4 hours. This was partly down to the fact that there was translation of what I said into Oriya and some other languages during the presentation itself but the activities that I'd set the team triggered lots of discussion and seemed to get people really thinking about the problem.

We could learn alot about running meetings from these people. What I really liked about the meeting was how everyone seemed to keep motivated and noone fell asleep except for the break after lunch when it's common for people to just lie down on the floor and have a nap. How civilised. I didn't manage to work out the trigger (possibly because I don't understand most of what is said) but every now and again, when people start to flag, someone just starts singing and everyone joins in and clapping in rhythm. The songs are usually led by a soloist or a small group with the rest joining in for what I assume is some sort of chorus or response. I must try to find out what the songs are about, they are tribal songs and I'm sure they have significant meaning. They are lovely to listen to. When it's time to reconvene after an activity session or a break, the people waiting start a rhythmic clapping that gradually gets faster and faster until eventually everyone returns to the room. And our cricket bats have had some use over the last few days!

The feedback after one of my fundraising exercises. Can anyone translate for me? And don't tell me it says media highlights, comit(t)ment and limited time manpower and resource. Please!

One of my tennis balls being lobbed around to wake people up and get them to talk about what they felt about the workshop

A photo taken a few weeks ago at an the disability orientation workshop during the more usual singing and clapping used to recharge everyone during the day

And at last, more than 7 weeks after arriving in Koraput my housemate has managed to move into her own home. She had been getting understandably frustrated by all the delays and was really pleased when her apartment was finally vacated last Friday and the place was given a good clean-up on Saturday ready for her to move in. We had been trying to work out how best to organise carrying all her gear the few hundred metres up the road from my house but of course this was team meeting weekend. Before 7:30 on Sunday morning a bunch of around half a dozen of the team turned up and made quick work of carrying everything up to her house. If they'd come much earlier they would have had to carry the bed complete with her still sleeping in it! It's really good news for her as her husband is due to arrive in Koraput in a few weeks time and she now has a bit of time to get the place sorted out so that it's a real home for him to move into. Hurrah!

Saturday sports

2009-10-10T18:25:00.002+05:30

Saturday is a working day for most of us working in NGOs here in India. This weekend there is a team meeting, a quarterly gathering of the SPREAD field-workers to discuss project progress, plans, training they've received etc plus the opportunity for everyone to get together. This is easier said than done when many of them live and work in very remote locations so it's good for them to meet up every few months in Koraput. These meetings are very different to anything I have experienced in the UK. When over 40 people have to gather in a small office I wondered how we'd all fit in but there was not problem as everyone just sits on the floor. There are periodic breaks when everyone starts singing traditional tribal songs and clapping. I can do the clapping bit but the rest is beyond me at the moment. We could learn something from this meeting style in the UK, everyone is much more relaxed and wanting to join in and actually look forward to coming to meetings. I've been in and out of the meeting, most of which is conducted in Oriya and some of the tribal languages but couldn't resist taking a few photos during breaks.

My lunch, served on a jungle-leaf plate. The ultimate in sustainable living and a darn sight easier than washing up in cold water

The lure of cricket doesn't go away. This is a combination of project coordinators, accountants, the NGO director and a bunch of local kids

One of the other things I bought in the sports shop in Bhubaneswar on my way to Koraput was a ring which proved a hit on the office-roof.

Snakes and things

2009-10-09T21:03:00.001+05:30

We had a bit of excitement in the office today when someone came running inside to tell us there was a snake outside. Always up for an excuse for a diversion we all hurried out to see a fairly large snake of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 metres slithering around outside the office, trying to find someplace to hide. It stuck it's head into a small drainage hole leading out of the office to try to get out of our way and the general concensus being that we would rather keep it out of the office one of the men took hold of a long stick and wedged it into the gap to stop the snake getting in any further. We then had the problem of large snake half in and half out of the office. Of course it had gone into the most inaccessible part of the building, a store-room that's rammed full of all the things that one day might be useful, along with a few musa (Oriya for mouse). Maybe the snake was after the mice? Unfortunately as many snakes round here are poisonous the safest solution was taken and the snake is no more.

I've heard that there's interesting wildlife like bears and tigers in Orissa but there is very little groundcover around here, most of the treecover long since having disappeared so the population is prety low. However, Mike told us that there was a brown bear spotted wandering around near his NGO office yesterday, just a few kilometres from my office. When I told one of my colleagues about this he told me that there had been one hanging around just outside the SPREAD office door last summer. Why do I never have my camera to hand when I need it? However, Margaret had hers with her so here they are:

I don't know why I'm smiling, it was a sad ending for the snake. My human companion is Ajaya, one of the accountants

I got up this morning and went onto the roof to retrieve last night's washing and found a creature in residence on my dupatta. It's rather lovely but fortunately flew off when I was trying to work out what to do with it

And on my way to the office a few days ago I was intrigued to see a lorry loaded with lumps of granite (the material used to build the foundations) turning into a field with a vacant building plot on it, followed by a group of women dressed in their best silk saris with flowers in their hair walking (barefoot of course) behind it. What was that all about? Some sort of ceremony to bless the new building plot? I'm told that all new houses are blessed before people can live in them so maybe it's something along those lines?

Bats

2009-10-06T21:44:00.000+05:30

I managed to pick up a cold virus last week and have spent a few days feeling very sorry for myself and using up far too much of my precious toilet tissue on my disgustingly runny nose. Which you really needed to know. But I'm feeling mostly better now, just a bit bunged up. It's years since I last caught a cold, I blame the change in climate and environment for succumbing.

Among the things that I brought with me to Koraput was a cricket bat and a couple of tennis balls. We had played a game of cricket in the Lodi Gardens in Delhi on our last day of In Country Training. This was the first time I had ever played cricket in my life and I don't have any talent for ball-sports but we had great fun and lots of passing Indians joined in the game. This made me think that a bat and a couple of balls might be a good ice-breaker in Koraput.

On my spare day in Bhubaneswar between those long train journeys I found a sports shop and bought a bat and tennis balls which I decided were safer, cheaper and lighter than the real thing. I began to regret the addition to my luggage while I was lugging things on and off the train, whacking people's shins with the bat strapped to the side of my rucksack but it was worth it. They have proven to be very popular at the office, after sitting idle in a corner by my desk for the first couple of weeks with every visitor picking up the bat to examine it they have at last come into use. Every evening for the last week or so I've got to around 5:00pm and started thinking it's nearly time to go home when someone has poked their head round the door to say "Madam, cricket". I end up getting very embarrassed by my lack of skill at even managing to hit the ball let alone score runs but it's good fun. It gets harder every minute as the light levels drop, the ball getting almost invisible as it's covered in the red dirt and blending in with the colour of the ground. However, I have managed to catch someone out once. It will probably be the last time it ever happens.

As the light fades the bats come out of their roost and start flying over. There are small bats darting around and hopefully catching some of those pesky mosquitoes, similar to the bigger species I sometimes see at home in UK but there are also enormous ones with a wing-span of around 2 foot. I have no idea what species they are but they could get pretty scarey if they got too close, their bodies are around the same size as a medium size cat. One of these days I might be able to get a photograph of them but of course my camers is never to hand at the right time. What any photo attempt would look like is another matter with a combination of a high-flying moving object and very low light conditions combined with no tripod - if I ever manage to try they will probably be just one big blur. I've been told that they roost in a large tree next to the police station so maybe I should try to capture them there.

On my way home today I was accosted by a gentleman that I'd been introduced to last week at my next-door neighbours house. I had been in a hurry to get home as I needed the toilet (something I try to avoid using at the office, I am still not used to squat toilets and hate going into ones outside my own house with bare feet). But my newly found friend asked me to come with him to his house and I feel so safe in Koraput that I had no hesitation in accepting. Off we went down a red dirt road that I hadn't ventured down before to find his house and was introduced to his wife and daughter who brought me a glass of warm water, a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea. Very nice but I got more and more uncomfortable and had to make my excuses as soon as it was polite to to so.

Then on the way past another house that doubles up as a bakery the lady of the house spotted me and asked me in. This was another family that I had met last week, she had insisted that I take a couple of pretty red and gold bangles the last time I visited and she would have been very offended if I'd refused to come inside. All the women here seem to wear lots of bangles, even those doing heavy lifting and building work. It's especially surprising when you realise that most of them are made of glass and are pretty fragile. They are part of everyday women's clothing and it's seen as strange not to wear them. I'm told that red ones signify marriage. I never normally wear anything like this and it feels quite odd to have a couple of rings of glass on my wrist, my hand is so big compared to Indian womens' hands that there is no hope of ever getting them off again save by breaking them. So of course another cup of tea was in order. It's lovely to be made to feel so welcome and to start to get to know some of the local people but I was desparate by the time I finally managed to get home!

I love the Ig nobel awards

2009-10-05T12:44:00.002+05:30

They make me giggle every year. Ten awards are made each year for achievements that make people laugh then make them think in categories loosely modelled on the Nobel prizes. They started in 1991 for discoveries that "cannot or should not be reproduced". Link from my favourite and sadly missed newspaper below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/02/ig-noble-awards-britons-top

Kumar Purnima

2009-10-04T10:41:00.000+05:30

Back to work on Thursday after a nice long break. On my way home from work I was passing a nearby house that also doubles up as a bakery when one of the occupants came out and beckoned my inside. She wanted me to meet her daughters and tiny new grandson, all of 10 days old. She spoke very little English but Kalyani, the 20 year-old daughter struck up a conversation and translated for us. They insisted I had a cha with them and gave me bisuits while they asked me about myself, my family, why I'm here in India etc. The usual questions, including what salary I get. They seemed a bit flummoxed when I told them that there is no salary, just a small allowance to buy food although I suspect that the VSO allowance, although far from generous is far more than many people here can earn. A common question here is whether I cook and do I cook Indian food. This time I was asked who cooked at home in the UK. They found it hard to believe that Jon does most of the cooking in our house and I used to go out to work full time while he looked after the house and me round his part-time job. In this part of rural India it's a concept that they find hard to get their heads round. I had to stop myself bursting out with a feminist tirade when Kalyani said it is every woman's duty to have babies. I tried to tell her that many women in Europe and America decide they don't want to have children and prefer to work but I'm not convinced she grasped what I tried to explain.

Friday was the anniversary of Gandhi's birthday, a national holiday in India but my NGO worked Friday and took Saturday holiday instead to celebrate Kumar Purnima festival. 'Kumar' or 'Kartikeya', the handsome son of Shiva was born on this day. Kumar also became the God of war. Tradition says young girls always wish for a handsome husband and they propitiate Kumar who was most handsome among the Gods. But there is no ritual for the God, instead the sun and the moon are worshipped. In the early morning the girls and women make food-offerings to the sun and I could hear singing and chanting going on all round the town. They observe fasting for the day. In the evening when the moon rises they again make food offerings and take it after the rituals are over.

My offering for the day was to invite Ali and Mike round for supper and a few beers. The first challenge was to work out what to make for supper. I walked into town in the morning with Mike to do some shopping but my menu planning being non-existant I didn't work out what I was going to make until later in the day at which point I just had to make do with what was in the house. Tomatoes are good at the moment, plentiful and cheap at just 10 rupees a kilo so it had to be something with tomatoes and the paneer I bought. We ended up with a very nice gazpacho made by Margaret followed by a sort of pinto bean and tomato dish with onion, garlic and ginger to perk it up (my version of baked beans) with paneer chilli. It seemed to go down well with all of us and copious amounts of beer were consumed during the evening while we put the world to rights and talked about some of the things that we have experienced here in India.

I started the day by opening the door to find a calf lying down in the front yard, having made it's way round the gap in the wall at the side of the house. When he eventually decided to get up he couldn't work out how to find the gap again so just waitied patiently at the gate until I opened it so that he could go wandering off up the street, leaving a nice offering of his own just inside the gate. A little later I went out to find 3 dogs curled up on the paved area enjoying the sun. I love dogs but am very wary of them here in India as the majority of them are feral, some fit and healthy but many in very poor condition with mange, malnutrition, injuries but worst of all, rabies is endemic here. Even those of us who have had the vaccination would need quick treatment and more jabs to protect us if we get bitten. The dogs too left their own offering. Lovely.

There's a tiny dairy shop in Koraput that sells paneer and dahi (yogurt) very cheaply. The dahi is kept inside a big stainless steel vat that he dips a ladle into and pours into a flimsy plastic bag and ties up with string that I somehow have to get home without it splitting and spilling all over everything else. The next trick is to open the bag without dahi spurting out all over the place. That's something I haven't yet worked out how to achieve. It's a good thing that it's cheap, I always seem to end up with a puddle of it on the worktop or down my front.

A tale of toilet tissue

2009-09-30T00:11:00.000+05:30

Today being another holiday Mike, Ali and I decided to have a day out and went to Jaypore, a much bigger town not far away. We all squashed onto the bus like sardines, along with about 150 other people and a bag of chickens on the luggage rack, clung to the bars and handrails while going up the hills, round the bends and over the lumps and bumps in the road to arrive feeling a bit bruised and battered an hour later. I don’t know how the chickens felt.

We wandered around the market and some of the shops which seem huge and really well stocked after the tiny stalls in the much poorer town of Koraput. I found a stall where I could buy some fabric to make into tea-towels and some handkerchiefs to replace the ones stolen off my washing line by a cow. One of the things that M and I really wanted to try to find was somewhere that sold comfy chairs, desperate to get away from the ubiquitous plastic chairs which are all we can get in Koraput. I’ve seen some lovely cane chairs that I’ve taken a fancy to but had been told they were brought from Bhubaneswar, too far for me to travel for chairs. A very nice man looking after another shop told us where to find a furniture shop then proceeded to escort us through a maze of back alleys to find it. It was of course closed. However, he insisted we take his phone number so he can help us next time we are in Jaypore.

Ali found a shop stocking decent tea – you’d think in India that it should be easy to get good tea. Not in Koraput, all that seems to be available there is Tata tea. I’m a bit of a tea snob and love good tea. I usually end up throwing away half my morning cuppa here as it’s so disgusting. I proceeded to risk getting 500gm of a tea that looked and smelled good but was as yet untested. Ali took me to a fabric shop that sells fabrics using traditional tribal weaves and patterns where I bought a sari to use as a bedspread and a couple of lengths of fabric to have made up into copies of a lovely top that I had bought elsewhere in India.

We found a little shop where I managed to buy myself a set of 4 knives, forks and spoons, 4 china mugs (small but better than steel or plastic), a can opener to finally open the can of tuna left behind in my house by Carol, a pestle and mortar for my spices, a tin caddy to keep the ants out of my new tea and a rechargeable emergency light to light my way when we have one of the many power cuts that are happening every few hours. A good shop and we were still accompanied by our new-found friend and guide. Our quest for comfy chairs thwarted, we trudged our way back along the main road to the shop we’d seen earlier that sells pillows and cushions and splashed out to a pillow and cushion each to try to make our plastic chairs more bearable.

The best find of the day was the shop that sold toilet paper. This was about the 6th shop that Ali had tried, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which shop to go to for anything in India, toilet paper being particularly awkward. Our Koraput shop had sold out of toilet paper and this being something we like to keep in stock we were on the lookout for more supplies. Ali found those supplies and Mike proceeded to buy up all his stock – all 17 rolls of it. I asked him if he had a problem he needed to talk about which for some reason made Ali collapse with laughter. What’s so funny about toilet paper? Our guide looked somewhat bemused by the volume but the shopkeeper seemed to think it was a perfectly normal transaction and worked out how much to charge for the loot. Mike was a happy man and promised to share out his goodies at home. I stuffed all 17 rolls into a bag and off we went.

Toilet paper is fairly voluminous and we were fairly laden down with other goodies and decided we didn’t fancy squashing ourselves plus shopping onto a bus. We treated ourselves to a taxi back home, waving goodbye to our guide. This was an extravagance at 400 rupees instead of 10 but shared between 3 of us seemed worth the cost to save the aggro of prising ourselves into the bus. It also meant that we could see the landscape out of the windows which pleased me; it’s lovely and quite spectacular in places. I wished I’d had my camera when we went past the cattle-market being held by the road just outside Jaypore, apparently around 1000 head are sold there every week. This explained the larger than usual number of cattle we’d seen wandering along the roads with herders encouraging them on. I made us a cup of tea en we got home and it was really good, the best tea I’ve drunk since I’ve been here.

Off to my newly found friendly neighbours for supper combined with hugs and kisses on arrival and departure and being made comfortable on a bed, reclining on nicely arranged pillows – rooms double up as bedrooms and sitting rooms and beds become chairs during the day here – nothing is specialist here. They call me Auntie. Except for the loss of all mobile phone and modem signal for most of the day – 4th day running it’s been a successful day.

Dussera

2009-09-28T18:26:00.005+05:30

Today is the day of the Dussera festival when most people don't go to work and the town was thronged with people dressed in their finery. It's a really colourful, noisy event and everywhere I went with my camera I had people wanting me to take their photos. After my rude awakening of the morning and clean-up exercise I decided to catch up with some emails and do a bit of work. Then the electricity went off, followed by my modem and mobile phone. When my battery was down to the last 10 minutes I decided to give up and go for a walk. That's when the heavens opened with a cyclone storm. I got wet. But it didn't really matter as it was warm and I took some photos on the way round a rural road that took me round a big curve and back into the town or Koraput.

View across some of the Koraput hills near the Kolab reservoir, part of the Machkund Dam series of reservoirs

I need to learn to carry things on my head like this

More than usually colourful Koraput market place

A tribal family

One of the dozens of tribal stalls with the produce beautifully presented and laid out

Kids jostling for attention

And some more

This cow obviously fancied a change from rotten cabbage

Wheels

2009-09-28T17:57:00.001+05:30

The cows don't care where they lie, everything has to go round them

Autorickshaw decorated for Dussera

Not sure how many people will fit into one rickshaw, my maximum count so far is 15

Five on a bike

Beautifully decorated bus on it's way to Jaypore. Why did it say Good Luck on the back?

This one says Good Luck on the front

This one belongs to a petrol tanker. So that's why the lorries say Good Luck.

Another day off work

2009-09-28T09:55:00.000+05:30

I woke up this morning still feeling full and needing to do some exercise so decided I needed to wash through some clothes again - they'd been washed but didn't smell good. These are things that I first washed just after I arrived in Koraput and they took so long to dry that they ended up smelling sour and musty as the water slowly turned stagnant. Not a great perfume so I had left them soaking with detergent overnight and washed them through this morning. Now washing bending down over a bucket in the bathroom is a messy business and I usually end up with my clothes soaking. This weekend I'm alone in the house, the shutters were all closed so I decided to take off my pyjama bottoms while I did the washing to make life a bit easier for myself.

At least I was just slightly covered up. As I wandered back through the house I jumped when one of the builders flung open a shutter from the outside and shouted "Pani pani" at me and pointing up to the roof. This took me by surprise as it was about 6:45 in the morning and on Dussera festival day when noone works. Oh well, I just had to cover up and go to switch on the water pump. There is a big water tank on the roof which is filled by water pumped up from our tube well, the murky looking pit just outside the house. The roof has a new hard surface on it that I guess needs to dry slowly to stop in cracking and they keep wanting to flood the roof with water from the tank. I hope we are not on a meter, it seems such a waste as I see water pouring over the roof and out through the new drainage outlets.

By this time I was well awake and needing to burn off a bit of the aggro from my surprise visitor as well as yesterday's calories so I set-to with a scraper on all the bits of mortar splashed all over the floors. They don't feel great under bare feet. I hadn't been able to find a paint scraper similar to the ones we use at home when decorating so have improvised with a kitchen spatula I found that's a bit more solid than most. So the next couple of hours were spent on my hands and knees scraping the floor with a spatula, brushing up the mess with my paintbrush/dustpan brush (fully clothed) followed by a swill down with the mop and bucket. Why do I do these things on my holiday I wonder? Probably because I'm too tired to to it after a day at work. I'm beginning to think that I really should have gone away for the weekend to have a proper rest.

I'm stuffed

2009-09-27T21:55:00.000+05:30

I started the day by deciding that I needed to do a bit of cleaning up after the builders. I may regret my efforts as they haven't finished yet and will be back soon to continue making a mess. However, there is a small balcony to the side of the house which has a small drain outlet at one end. Not so long ago, that drain got blocked by builders rubble, the monsoon rain flooded the balcony and water poured into the house, flooding the floor with several inches of water. The monsoon has slowed right down but there is still the odd downpour and I decided to avoid the risk of a repetition of the flood and cleared the rubbish off the balcony and cleaned the mortar off the windows, shutters and grilles. I got filthy and sweaty and wore out my broom. I also cleaned out the fridge which was starting to look a bit fluffy around the seal and found a cabbage rotting inside a bag at the back. I made a passing cow very happy when I chucked her the cabbage.

Mike called me mid-morning and asked if I wanted to go into town. I jumped at the opportunity as I'd had enough of cleaning for one day. We both had shopping lists of things we wanted to get for our houses to try to turn them into something a bit more like homes. It is very sad when we think about how excited we are by our purchases. I was thrilled to find that there is a shop in Koraput that sells proper full-size sheets. Most of the sheets here seem to be more like drapes, not big enough to tuck in at the ends and sides so they get all wrinkled up underneath while you are in bed. Not so comfy. Just look at what I managed to buy today:

Aren't they lovely? A little different to the plain white or cream sheets I have on my bed at home but they are big enough to stretch across the whole bed and tuck in at the sides!

My next exciting find was a plate rack so that I can get the washing up off the worktop and somewhere on the floor out of the way. We are blessed with a worktop that drains away from the sink so when I leave washing-up on the side the water runs off to the side and sits in a puddle in the corner. Even more exciting than that was a new broom to replace the one that I've worn out on the builders rubble. I cannot find a Western style broom with a decent brush-head and long handle, all that I have found here so far are bunches of twigs or seed heads or rushes. I've found the rush most effective, the seed heads just leave seeds behind, the twigs miss half the dirt and send bits flying everywhere but the rush ones are OK. Look at this:

My lovely new broom

Sadly I ended up having to buy 2 of these brooms as the first one disappeared from the pole straps on the side of my rucksack - possibly stolen by a passing cow who took a fancy to it. Fortunately these things only cost 7 rupees each and they are fully biodegradable so I just made the vendor very happy to have sold 2 to me in one day.

The best find of the day though was the egg-boxes. Someone asked me after my last blog posting about how easy it is to get eggs here. They are easy to find, less easy to carry home as they are put into bags to bring back. But today we found egg boxes - wonderful!

So Koraput really does have egg boxes

Mike was also very pleased to find the egg boxes and proceeded to make use of it when he bought more eggs. It was a toss up whether this was his best purchase of the day or the nails he bought. Don't we live exciting lives here in Koraput?

We finished the morning by a very nice and very large lunch at a hotel in town, courtesy of Mike. We chose tandoori chicken and chicken biryani to share. All the chicken's we'd seen here in Koraput have been pretty small and weedy so we decided to go for a whole chicken for us to share. Bad idea, there was more meat there than I'd normally eat in a week. I was pretty full as we staggered back up the hill home with our loot.

On my return I had a shower and washed my clothes and new sheets. While pegging them out on the line, my neighbours called out to me and asked me to come into their house to talk to them. This was the first time I'd managed to say more than a brief namaskar to them. Today I was introduced to them all and was made very welcome in their home. Bhaskar is a linguist who speaks around 15 languages, he's offered to help me learn Oriya with the assistance of his niece who also lives there along with her daughter and various other family members. I ended up staying there for about 4 hours and they insisted that I ate dinner. More chicken masala, with egg noodles, rice and dhal. Now I am so stuffed I can hardly move. I couldn't refuse the offer of a meal as it would have been considered very rude and bad manners, eating is a very important part of the culture here and it's not good to leave food on your plate. People are always asking me if I have eaten, did I cook it and what have I eaten. I guess the concern and interest is triggered by the malnutrition and starvation that is all too common here. I won't need to eat again for another week!

A day off work

2009-09-26T12:10:00.003+05:30

It's Dussera festival weekend here in India, celebrating Durga's triumph over the demon Mahishasura. The festival lasts for 10 days and is one of the most auspicious occassions of the Hindu calendar. Most businesses close for a day or so holiday, I have 6 full days without work! This is great for me as I'm feeling pretty tired after the stress of arrival in India, learning new things, travel across to Orissa (twice), trying to make a home and get to grips with a new job.

Yesterday I had a really exciting day, walking twice into town to get some food and bits and pieces for my house. I did my shopping in the wrong order, really not thinking things through properly beforehand. I had invited A and M round for supper and decided to make something using chicken. This was the first time I'd ventured into carniverous cuisine here and I hadn't experienced the chicken store before. Let's just say I can be sure that my chicken was extremely fresh. I decided that I needed to get the chicken home ASAP and into the fridge as it was a pretty warm day, the rest of the shopping would have to wait. And the meat needed to be cooled down!

I walked back into town for a second time in the afternoon to look for a couple of tin trunks to store my clothes, towels and my one spare sheet in. Up till now my belongings have been stuffed into cases or vacuum bags strewn around the place. It's really nice to be able to get them put away properly and easy to find again. The trunks were too big and heavy to carry home so after trying to explain to the storeholder that I would leave them at his store while I found an auto to take me home (he spoke no English and my Oriya will not stretch that far) I got an auto just around the corner and told the driver what I wanted by gesticulating wildly. We stuffed the trunks onto the seat next to me and rattled our way over the bumps and potholes up the slope towards home with me pointing and grunting to try to explain the route. I know where my house is and how to get there but don't yet know the address which adds to the challenge. I'm a bit like a dog that knows how to get home but can't tell you the address. He got me home safely and only charged me 20 rupees and a handshake for the privelage. My house is starting to look slightly more presentable and I might even have more chance of finding things.

There is a string of email banter going on among the VSO volunteers here in India at the moment. It was triggered by a 'basket of goods' survey we were asked to complete to gather info on the cost of living, presumably to check that the VSO allowance is adequate. One of the items was cheese, something that's very difficult to find in rural India and not easy in cities. The 'best store in Koraput' sometimes has processed cheese, a little like Dairylea spread. Not quite the local farmhouse cheeses that I treat myself to back at home but it is a welcome change to be able to put something savoury onto my bread. This survey sent us vols into a series of mails all of us craving cheese and threatening to break into the houses of volunteers who admitted that they had managed to procure cheese. It's strange what having to live without a favourite food can do to us. I threatened M with a lynching when he was served in front of me in our local best store and he proceeded to buy up Amar's whole stock of cheese, all 4-5 packets. I thought that was just not fair but he relented and very kindly brought one of the packs round to my house the next day along with a couple of cans of Fosters so order is restored in this part of Koraput. A and M came round to share my chicken concoction for supper. I was beginning to crave something other than curry and managed to conjures something up with chicken, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans and peas along with some basil and thyme I'd brought from home. It seemed to go down OK and all the food was eaten without ill effect. But no cheese-board, sadly.

The builders are still hard at work on my house. I arrived home from work on Thursday to find scaffolding in the house. They use bamboo poles for scaffolding here and there are half a dozen poles shoved through the grilles on the window, balanced on the frame with a bit of thin wire wrapped round to hold them in place.

This one's right outside my bedroom door and I was worried I'd walk straight into the splintery bamboo which is at eye-level so it's now tastefully decorated with my one cushion of the house

At the moment they are busy finishing off the base of the parapet wall that's appeared round the roof. And of course there are bits of mortar, wet and dry flying into the house. Reminds me of when we had builders into our home in the UK a couple of years ago. There's lots of shouting and hammering going on out there, echoing wildly around the house which has no soft furnishings to absorb noise. Time to go out and see what festival celebrations are building up in town for this evening I think.

A day at the office

2009-09-23T21:57:00.005+05:30

There was a workshop on disability orientation today at my NGO, delivered to most of the SPREAD programme coordinators to enhance their understanding of the problems facing people with any sort of disability. It was facilitated in Hindi by Praveen from VSO with translations where needed into English and the tribal languages used by many of the people there. I didn't understand most of it but was able to pick up the gist of the programme and had to join in the laughter at some of the exercises which looked great fun at the same time as being pretty informative. The team were divided into groups and each group were told to simulate a different disability and then to eat lunch outside. The pictures tell the story much better than I could

First find your way out of the workshop

And then round the side to wash your hands

The only way to lift a stack of plates with your hands tied is with the help of a partner

Eating with your hands tied adds to the challenge of no cutlery

Margaret & Ajaya from SPREAD and Praveen from VSO

I wish I could read this

I managed to get M to take a photo of me but I am looking really self-conscious and no salwar kameez today

Back home for the evening we shared a few drinks with Mike, Ajaya and Praveen and put the world to rights and talked about our favourite music. It seems that Praveen shares my Johnny Cash obsession which helped me to feel a bit more at home.