It was back in April when my friend Liz talked about making a trip to Kumaon for the weekend to visit Avani, an NGO that works with villages based in remote mountain areas in Kumaon and provides them with the skills, equipment and resources to produce and market locally sourced textile products. I didn’t really know where Kumaon was at the time but I thought about escaping the Delhi heat and smog and returning to the mountains and said I’d like to come along.
Our journey to get to Avani was pretty epic as on arriving at Haldwani it was pouring with rain and continued to rain all day causing a series of landslides and roadblocks. Each time we reached one of these roadblocks we would be stuck for a couple of hours until the landslide slowed down to a trickle of small rocks rather than giant slabs of free falling hillside or tree trunks. Still, there are definitely worse places to be stuck when it comes to scenery. It’d been two solid months of hot, dry, dusty weather since I’d left Delhi so arriving in Kumaon felt like someone had adjusted the colour setting on my retinas. All around us were layer upon layer of the most incredible bright greens. Rice paddies that were just coming into harvest, pine forests, banana plants, fig trees and fields of wild hemp. I’ve been told that spending a day in Delhi is equivalent to smoking between ten to twenty cigarettes a day. If that’s true then a couple years have already been knocked off my life, but after just half an hour in the mountains I felt as though my lungs had been taken out, given a good scrub and replaced.
If you’ve read the A-Z of insects post then you may remember the incident with the hunter spider. So, when we eventually arrived at Avani and went to our room and I looked up at the ceiling to see an enormous spider that was even bigger and hairier than the one that bit me in Darjeeling I wasn’t quite so free and easy about it this time. Still, I checked with one of the men working at Avani and he assured me that, “no maam, it’s not dangerous.” Fine. And it was fine, until I got bitten on the foot in exactly the same place by a leech. I’ve managed to live through months in the wilderness without encountering a single leech yet one walk through the mountains and one managed to find its way into my trainer and sucker itself to my foot. It was only when we arrived back from the walk and I removed my trainers that I discovered it but I still didn’t realise it’d bitten me until we were sat at lunch and Liz exclaimed in horror at my foot which was covered in blood. This swiftly alerted all the Avani volunteers who were sat having their lunch and who I’d only just met, so from then on when our paths crossed they would exclaim, “oh, you’re the girl who had a leech on her foot.” Sigh.
On the Saturday Rashmi and her husband Rajnish who run Avani had planned out a day for us to visit one of the villages in the morning where they do most of the weaving and spinning and then be taken on a tour of the Avani grounds in the afternoon. Getting to the village involved another short jeep ride and then a hike down through the mountains, stopping first at the house of a couple who use solar power for their electricity and a bio-gas system (converting waste into cooking gas) for their cooking stove. We were taken past buffaloes and goats and into their garden to see the bio-gas system. However, I got slightly distracted by the kid (baby goat) that trotted down the path after us. It looked up expectantly and made the customary goat, “mehh,” noises, stood perfectly still as I stroked it behind the ears and then became impatient and started climbing up Liz’s leg when I stopped stroking it. Perhaps it’s because most of the animals you see in Delhi; cows, monkeys, chipmunks (Indian squirrels but they look like chipmunks), dogs, are fairly hostile and tend to look at you like they want to hurt you, but my heart melted and for a moment I was seriously contemplating moving to the mountains just so I could adopt this goat. I like to think it shared my sentiments as when we thanked the couple and started making our way further down the mountain path, the goat again started to run after us and its owner had to hold it whilst we walked away (the picture in this blog).
Still pining after the goat, we were taken deeper into the mountains down into the valley where the village and weaving centre were located. Being led through the gardens of more white washed, slate roofed houses with brightly painted doors and windows and livestock tied up outside. The weaving centre was quite tightly packed with about six weaving machines and the women sat behind them were making scarfs made from a mixture of silk and cotton thread that had also been spun in the village. For their work they are paid approximately Rs.100 a day (equivalent of local government minimum wage) depending on whether they work there part time or full time. Around 60% of the men from the village leave at certain times of year to find work in the cities so it’s fairly common for the women to have to look after the house, livestock and harvesting the farm land for months at a time on their own. The weaving provides additional work that is flexible and enables them to earn an income that can be used to pay for things above the bare minimum day to day living costs, i.e. school fees, local travel. After visiting the centre we were taken into several more houses where the women spin silk or cotton. Again most of them explained that it is something they do in their spare time when they are not looking after the house and farm. One of the women said that when the rest of the family sit down to watch the TV at the end of the day she prefers to sit and spin. Having watched Indian television I can totally sympathise with this.
On the same day in the afternoon we were taken around the grounds of Avani where the main solar power and renewable energy operation takes place, including a workshop where they train local people to make solar powered lights that are then sold locally. The Avani headquarters is a pretty impressive set up and without the distraction of baby goats I listened a bit harder this time. Electricity and heating is powered by the giant solar panels on all the roofs and the water used for washing, cooking and drinking is rain water that is collected through pipes connected to the gutters that run down into giant water tanks underneath each building. Cooking gas is powered by a giant bio-fuel machine that is fed with pine needles that are found in abundance lining the forest floor surrounding the compound, plus collecting the pine needles prevents the forest fires from getting too close. I wish I understood more about water treatment processes as from what Rajnish was explaining to the two American engineers that were also visiting it seems like that too was a pretty slick operation. Seeing all of this did make me think more about just how much energy we waste and what a cleaner, less wasteful world it would be if more of us lived in such a way, especially as it seemed to largely be based on common sense and biology and not on vastly expensive, complicated technology.
NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) often get a lot of bad press in India or are seen by those that don’t work in the sector as corrupt (mind you I’ve learnt that’s also a word applied to just about everything in India) or tokenistic. Of course these stories don’t come from nowhere and some of them are founded on the truth but the more time I spend in India and the more NGOs I get to know, including my own, the more I admire the passion of those that work for them and the fact that they are often the only operations providing much needed support to India’s marginalised communities. They are also helping to slowly erode this idea of ‘charity’ and instead work with their beneficiaries to find the most sustainable and beneficial solutions for them.
I didn’t come back from the mountains with the baby goat – it would hardly of been fair to take it away from its idyllic mountain home to the mean streets of Delhi where it would probably have been eaten by a monkey – but if I don’t return from India in a year or so’s time as scheduled then you’ll know where to find me.
