Different Living

Yesterday evening I sat in the community hut and talked with a man named Raj from Rajasthan. We had met earlier in the morning and talked about languages as we mulched seedlings in the reforestation zone. Raj is a musician and a romantic poet who learned Urdu and Farsi in school along with English. Urdu and Farsi are written with the Arabic, as is Uyghur. We sat with notebooks and pens and I wrote out some Uyghur words and phrases and he wrote out some Farsi words and phrases and we read from each other's notebooks, amazed at the power of script. I sang Raj a Uyghur song about a nightingale (nightingale is bulbul in Uyghur, and Urdu, and Farsi) and he translated it back into English for me. Raj- poet that he is- said that he studies languages because when you learn to speak the language of a different culture, you involve your heart in thinking about that culture.

Sadhana Forest, is full of language. About 50 volunteers stay in the thatch huts that surround the reforestation ares. A Czech man rode his bicycle here from Prague. A French mother and her three children are spending their holiday months learning about compost. Six environmental-planning students from Plymouth State college in Massachusetts are here for a Jan-term class. There are garden projects and energy projects as well, but the main aim of the cooperative is reforestation and water conservation. Through the construction of earth dams, water catchment pits, and tree planting the water table beneath the area has risen 6 meters in the past 6 years. 6 meters!

Lukin and I will stay at Sadhana for two weeks. We woke up this morning in our hut which is constructed of bamboo, palm thatch, and rope. Breakfast was porridge and papaya cooked over energy-efficient conical "rocket stoves" constructed to fit one pot and use a minimal amount of wood (one billet feeds 50!). Our food scraps are converted into soil which Lukin and I spent yesterday afternoon spreading on the garlic and gerbera daisy beds. Human waste is separated into bins; the liquid variety is processed into fertilizer and the solid broken down into soil using sawdust from the building projects. The entire endeavor, the 50 of us probably produce in one week the amount of garbage I alone produce in one day of my life in the city. It's inspiring to be immersed in and learning about the possibilities to do things differently. Lukin and I are taking notes!

Of course in all of this aspiration towards sustainability, there is the consideration of the cost. Today we took the bus into the nearby city of Pondicherry and drove past piles of plastic litter and homes of corrugated tin and thatch. The up-front cost of conversion to an off-the-grid life is unthinkable to most. The amount of space that Sadhana uses to produce and break down its food and waste is unavailable to families of 6 or 7 who live one room. The access to grants and start-up capital that have helped Sadhana take flight are accessed through years and grands worth of education. I think about all of this as I mulch seedlings and munch on organic carrots. But there is something to be said for the innovation, and the trial run of it. I read in the Times of India this morning that sales of solar panels in California are higher than they've ever been- in spite of, or because of the recession. Demand increases, prices decrease, accessibility increases... slowly slowly on the large scale. On the small scale, my individual knowledge of what is possible has increased and my skepticism of composting toilets has decreased. I hope that in the coming weeks I take from my time at Sadhana a soil-like ability to absorb the ideas and information that come from immersion in a different way of living.

Thanks to a Stranger

Tonight Lukin and I stood on the street in our giant back packs and looked at each other. The three internet cafes we had located were all closed, we had 5 hours until our train would leave and we weren't hungry (food is usually a great way to use time!). As we stood, a man who had pointed us to the first of the three closed cafes came over to us. "I'll help you," he said, and motioned for us to follow him. He led us to a fourth cafe, closed. He motioned again for us to follow. He spoke with several people on the street who each answered and pointed in various directions. We followed as he led us across several intersections and over an overpass. He walked us to the door of internet cafe number five, open. This stranger on the street spent twenty-five minutes helping us find what we were looking for. When we thanked him, he gave the characteristic Indian head waggle and smiled, and then he walked back the way we had came. I cannot think of a single time I have done something like that for someone I didn't know.

Kolkata Christmas

Again, ages since I sat down to write. This time I sit in a very different context, an unfamiliar country and culture and climate- in Kolkata. We saw the students off from Beijing. It is a strange feeling, heavy and light, to go from being responsible for 9 other people to only being responsible for yourself.
The day following the students departure, my dad came to Beijing for a visit. It was lovely and laid back. We went on long meandering walks through the upscale neighborhoods and underground shopping plazas of WangFuJing street, and then contrasted them with grimy old-Beijing hutong walks. Each day we found our way into small street-side restaurants where we snacked on steamed buns and tea eggs. We met up with my old friends from Taiwan who have found their ways into jobs and homes and families in Beijing. It was fun for both of us to call a Beijing youth hostel home for a few days.

I flew from Beijing to Kunming on the 17th and from Kunming to Kolkata on the 18th and into the 19th due to an unscheduled landing in Dhaka, Bangladesh to wait out a thick fog that shrouded Kolkata. While I waited, sprawled out on the plastic seats of the Dhaka airport, Lukin waited, sprawled out on the plastic seats of the Kolkata airport. At dawn I landed in Kolkata and flung my exhausted and elated self into Lukins weary arms. At that moment we realized just how long four months can be.

We've spent the last several days absorbing what we can of Kolkata. The city is made of sounds; honking horns from 50's style Ambassador taxi's, echoing calls to prayer, "hellos" hollered from merchants hawking everything from lime water to cell-phone repair (seriously, brilliant men at street-side stands holding soldering guns who make me wish I had brought to India the phone I just put through the washing machine in Kunming), jingling rupees on tin plates gripped by street people ranging in age from infants to grandmothers.

The sounds are accompanied by scents; masala chai stands sprout up each morning at nearly every intersection and for 6 cents you can take a moment of your day to sit in a small wooden bench and breath in cardamom and cloves from a small clay cup (they're meant to be disposable as they easily biodegrade, but I can't bring myself to throw them away, so I now have a stack of them wrapped up in my backpack!), curries and chilies and cumin waft from street-stand vats of dhal which I dove into head first on my first few days of wandering, mixed with all this is the scent of people- incredible numbers of people- the streets are the hallways and kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms of millions of bodies and the sharp odors of urine and bodies is ever present.

A good segue, back, for a moment into diving head first into street food. I also dove head first into my first bout of India-induced illness. In our first few days back together, Lukin spent a couple of them nursing my violently-ill-self back to health as India streamed from me. Romantic.

And now it is Christmas and we are spending our last few hours in Kolkata before heading to the train station to make our way south to Puri tonight, and then on to Pondecherri and tree-planting on Sunday. Today, walking through the streets was like waiting in line for a a Bollywood blockbuster. We shuffled sideways and maneuvered for hours to wend our way around town. The sidewalks are packed with bodies and glitter and Christmas families out on the town. It was wonderful and crazy to be carried for blocks by thick crowds. We are ready to make our way south, towards smaller towns and calmer scenes. I love Kolkata though. This place is incredible.

Strangers

It feels like ages since I last wrote. Using the internet in Xinjiang is a different ballgame. To gain access you first have to present your passport to the clerk at the internet cafe and then try to weave your way around the abundant firewalls by sneaking through all sorts of proxy servers. I failed at this game and couldn't access blogspot which is part of the reason I've been so long between posts. The other part is that we have been traveling pretty hard for the past few weeks and what access we have had to computers and free-time has been limited. In the past three weeks this group of 12 has found its way through five cities/towns separated by 75 hours of train rides and 22 hours of bus rides and hours of walking pack-laden through foreign streets in search of our home for the night. West across Xinjiang through Urumqi, Turpan, Kashgar, and the border-town ( w/ Tajikistan Pakistan & Afghanistan) Tashkorgan and then back through them all to exit through the south east of the province into Gan Su province, and across that into Qing Hai's capital city Xi Ning where we now rest for a day and reflect on the faces and places and worlds we have shared with our generous, deep-rooted, home-sharing friends of the desert.

This province, mountainous and many-bordered is home to 55 of the 56 ethnic minority groups in China (says China.org, but my cab driver this morning told me there are only 50). The people of these ethnic minority groups make up more than 2.38 million, or 45.5%, of the province's population. Largest in number are the Tibetan people (21.89% of the population) who have been living on the plateau for countless generations. The Dali Lama is was born in what is now Qing Hai. Tomorrow will find us in one of the small Tibetan mountain towns which border the city. A local non-profit organization dedicated to the cultural and ecological preservation of the Qing Hai Tibetan plateau has invited us to teach English and do some translation work in one of the schools where they operate cultural preservation projects including Tibetan language classes and Tangka painting workshops. These are links to the organization's websites, which are mostly in Chinese, some photographs that are quite nice: http://feiyu.tibetcul.com/49422.html and http://www.qtpep.com/. We will spend five days and nights in home-stays with families.

The process of a home-stay, arriving in a strange place at a strange home and then being surrounded by the daily life of strangers, is quite intense. This has especially been the case in the minority villages we have stayed in where Miao, or Tibetan, not Chinese, has been the language spoken. I often find myself feeling useless and helpless... and silent. Silence is not my usual state of being. I think it's really good for me to have no choice but to practice silence. Being moved to a level of communication that consists mainly of observation and miming is an opportunity to focus on the world of doing and being and away from the world of saying and explaining. It's a world where walk matters much more than talk, where the non-verbal arts of expression and perception are sharpened. I hope that I will make time in my life to practice these arts and skills when I'm back in the world where I often rely on my words to do my walking for me.

Finally

One summer before last I spent eight weeks in Southern Indiana learning a language spoken in Central Asia. Uyghur. Not many people have heard of this language, or indeed of this people. About 11 million people in this world are Uyghur, and of those about 8 million live here in Xinjiang Provence of Western China. Why study a language like Uyghur? Virtually unknown to the world... not likely to be appreciated if even recognized on my resume... a language dwindling even in the schools where Uyghur children learn. Why?

Eight years before last I spent a year in Beijing studying a language spoken in China. Mandarin. Everyone has heard of it. A fifth of the world is Chinese. I never have to come up with a reason why I study Chinese, the sheer enormity of the population of speakers provides reason enough. One in every eight people in the world is a Chinese peasant. It looks great on my resume. But is one fifth of the world Chinese... really? In a country roughly the size of the continental United States, there are 56 governmentally recognized ethnic minority groups and 236 distinct languages spoken, along with rich and varied dialects of each. What we think of as China, Kung Pao Chicken and Beijing Olympics, is topical and incomplete- what we think of as China is like the apple pie and baseball myth of America we export.

In December of that 2000 I got on a train in Beijing, hurled westward for 72 hours, and got off in Kashgar- a silk road city near the China-Pakistan border. My eyes opened onto a China that I had never imagined, and my ears opened to a language I had never heard that sounded like the curling twisting Arabic script in which it is written. The people I met personified the desert borderlands they have lived on for more than thirty centuries. Through those thirty centuries a nomadic imperative of kindness to strangers has prevailed; I was welcomed into homes, served raisins, pomegranate seeds and naan bread while the families that hosted me kept to the Ramadan fast- I ate with the children the elderly and the sick. I broke the fast with pool-playing teenagers. I walked in streets empty of men called to prayer, but full of women carrying baskets and chatting with me as I learned the ancient market routes. An American girl in Xinjiang, a month before the inauguration of Bush II.

In the years that have spread between my first visit to Xinjiang and my first return a week ago, I have not been able to erase the place and the warmth from my mind. I watched as the years plowed forward, horrified, as my own nation, my own people, were swept into a culture of aggression and fear. I watched as that fear spread outwards from ground zero in ripples of intolerance- blind to fact and reason and refusing accountability for our own actions. I watched as our terror spread here, to the borderlands of China and Central Asia, to the homes and families that had welcomed me, fed me, opened my mind.

And now I'm back. And in the time that has lapsed I've taken action against the transgressions of my own nation in my own small way. I learned enough of the Uyghur language to say "thank you for your kindness" and "I'm sorry". I've learned enough to go out to dinner with a Uyghur friend and express my admiration and awe of the history and culture of his people. In taking the time and putting forth the effort to learn a small amount of the words and the culture and the sense of context that comes from language learning, I have gained a better understanding of this land and an appetite for further learning.

As my Uyghur friend and I left the restaurant I asked him how to say friend in Uyghur slang. As he pronounced the word I jotted it down in my smudgy Arabic hand in my notebook. He looked at me and said that this was the first time he had ever seen a Uyghur word written by a foreign hand. He said that he felt honored and proud. I felt weepy and grateful and hopefully. We smiled at each other. That was the evening of November 5th. On the walk home I bought a Uyghur language newspaper. On the front page a picture of a beaming Obama glowed above a single Uyghur word; "Finally".

9 Items

Looking around the kitchen of my home stay family in the Miao mountain village of Bai Bi Cun, I counted 9 items. 1) A wood-fired cook stove consisting of two large cast iron woks (resting in one lay an oversized spatula for stirring) recessed into a tile unit with a chimney rising up from the middle. 2) A two-basin tile sink fed by a hose running up from outside through the window. 3) A tea kettle. 4) A broom made from twigs lashed together with with twine. 5) A six-inch deep cross-section of tree that was used for a cutting board. 6) A set of three cleavers that ranged in size from large to daunting. 7) A half a wooden barrel punctured by a hole in the side with a cork stuck in it- which I later learned was  still from which rice moonshine was produced. 8) A shovel-cum-dustpan used for loading sawdust, wood shavings, and floor sweepings into the fire. And 9) a stack of small bowls and chopsticks. Nine items in that kitchen. 

Thinking back to Lukin's and my tiny kitchen in Missoula, there were nine items in every drawer, on every surface, crammed into every cabinet. Two of us and twenty forks. The ceramic pot that lived on the stove alone held nine items- spoons of various materials and uses, a spatula for scraping, one for flipping, a plastic one for the non-stick pans and a wider metal one for the cast iron... yet another for the wok. I found myself making a lot of lists and doing a lot of comparisons over the four days we spent in the village. I compared my lengthy showers to the typical Bai Bi Cun method of washing- standing on the road in front of the house and sudzing from a plastic bucket, using a rag to rinse off, and dumping the water in the gutter of the dirt road. 

I compared the meal times and foods with the schedule and variety with which I am accustomed. In Bai Bi Cun, breakfast, usually around 9:00 or 10:00, was served after morning chores and farm work were completed. Family members eat together. Every meal. Lunch was served around 3:00 after another round of chores and farm work, and then, after yet another round of chores and farm work, dinner at 8:00. Every every meal consisted of rice and potatoes. Once or twice we, as guests, we were treated to spicy bowls of fried lettuce and a pile of scrambled eggs- and one very special evening, to fish caught from the rice paddy and served with scales and innards (all but the gall bladder which is called "bitter ball" in Chinese, and removed prior to cooking). Everything we ate was grown or raised or laid within a hundred steps of the kitchen and everything we ate was the same every day. Even the moonshine. I thought about the movements in Missoula and elsewhere to eat locally grown food- how eating can be a significant political and economic act, to the point that weekly columns in the Sunday paper are dedicated to influencing or critiquing the food choices of Missoulians. I thought about the extravaganza that is the Saturday morning Farmers Market and the endless wall of imported spices at The Good Food Store. And I thought about Bai Bi Cun and eating those six or seven things, especially to two main staples, potatoes and rice, everyday for my entire life. Eating locally as a choice versus eating locally without choice are two very different things. As I write this, here in my Kunming apartment, I am finishing off a plate papaya and banana salad, which follows a dinner two hours ago that consisted of several Chinese dishes involving more ingredients than I can list; nothing I ate grew or was raised or laid within 20 miles of me, and I eat something different everyday.  Zero chores- save washing way more than 9 dishes using running hot water and soap- and zero farm work did I contribute to my meal. I eat whenever I'm hungry, regardless of what work I have or have not done. More often than not I eat alone. I continue to mull the comparisons in my mind.

We've been out of the mountains and back in the city for a week and a half now. Half a week more and we hit the road again. Our students are hard at work putting together presentations on the topics they've researched for the last 6 weeks. Their topics range from China's environmental woes to the history and future of tea in Chinese society. Following their presentations on Friday and a weekend celebration with their home stay families, we will find our way by train or bus or air, or some combination of them all, to China's north west- where the Uyghurs are, and where my heart is. I can hardly wait. The province of Xinjiang, where the role of rice will be played by nan bread, and potatoes... well they're still potatoes. I wonder what 9 items I'll find in kitchens there. 

A new return to GuiZhou

I'm sitting here enjoying a rare moment of stillness while the students are in Chinese class. We have fallen into a routine of early morning meetings and language classes, afternoons of independent study classes and optional lessons around Kunming. The students are learning the ins and outs of daily life in a Chinese family, and how to navigate the web of bus routes between the Program House, their home stay houses and the University district. The students are working hard on their independent projects, the instructors are working hard on contacting mentors and arranging guest lectures and the weeks spin by. We are somewhere between a groove and a rut. It's time for us to get out again. (the photo is XiJiang, a village in GuiZhou)

This Sunday Lear and Mark and I will pile the dozen of us onto an overnight train to GuiZhou- the provence due East of Yunnan. We will ride the rails to KaiLi, a city three hours East of the capital city GuiYang, and then find our way into the hills in search of a village to call home for the week and families willing to host our horde. Our aim in this adventure is to break away from the day to day we have come to know and to provide some alternative perspectives on what day to day life means in China. As Lear Mark and I have never been to GuiZhou, nor do we have contacts there, this is an opportunity for the three of us to break away from our own routines and push ourselves to risk a bit and encourage inclusion of the students in the prep and planning, transit-tracking, village-visiting, house-hunting, food-finding, and lesson-learning. I can't wait to get on that train.

We chose GuiZhou, in part for its unfamiliarity and, conversely, in part for my familiarity with planning adventures there. During my studies in Missoula my IYFD cohort wrote a proposal for a Fulbright Hayes group study grant. We proposed to take UM professors and Missoula K-12 teachers on an educational tour through areas of China (GuiZhou) and Laos that are the ancestral and current home of many tribes of the Miao or Hmong people. Missoula is home to nearly 300 Hmong families and we found the idea of helping area teachers understand the ancestral home of the Hmong people an exciting idea. The Fulbright Hayes committee, however, did not. So I have found my own way here and am in the process of reviewing our proposal and recycling parts that have relevance to my students. Funny how life works.

On a different note, yesterday marked the one-month anniversary of our students arrival in China. Time is funny here; though the days seem to crawl to completion, the weeks fly by.  It won't be long now at all until we leave Kunming for good to begin our circuitous travels towards Beijing and then fling away towards new and old homes in the States, Korea, England and India. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, GuiZhou...