Thursday, April 20, 2006

“The heart of a world in which all hearts are one.”

The Universal Incarnation, Sri Aurobindo.

I waited to see where the 5-person packed auto rikshaw was going and whether I could be the 6th. Bargaining rikshaw prices in Delhi is next to impossible for me, but I knew with 6 of us it would be much less than my own rik.

As I got on, I was still in search of how I’d cross the border by road. For the last few days people kept talking of a bus and a train from Delhi, but I hadn’t been able to find out where to catch either. I recognized one of the passengers with the driver in the front as a fellow visa applicant. I called him Uncle (as I do to anyone my Dad’s age) and asked about the bus and the train. Soon enough we were on our way to the Delhi-Lahore bus bus stand at the Dr. Ambedekar Station in Old Delhi to buy tickets.

‘Uncle’ is a Muslim from Calcutta; he’ll be crossing the border to visit much of his family which is in Karachi. Thinking about how far Calcutta is from Karachi, and remembering a friend remark earlier in the day that “only an idiot could have separated the India and Pakistan in those days because the culture is in total continuum across the border”, sent waves of a past that wasn’t too long ago.

Realizing that in the larger picture it hasn’t been so long since the two nations were one, made me discount my own uncle’s remark that later in the day, “Be careful. The country is filled with dangerous people.” What my uncle didn’t think about is just as the halves of separated families like that of the Uncle from Calcutta are in Pakistan, so are in India the halves of the “dangerous” people in Pakistan.


I didn’t make it to Pakistan in Nov. after the quake. Finally, there is another opportunity to go, see, and do. I’ll leave tomorrow morning on a bus from Delhi to Lahore. The final destination is Islamabad and the quake affected areas.

(Sparse email until May 10.)

Monday, April 17, 2006

Hope!!

Hopefully the micro hydro electricity in the villages can help makes some of these biodegradable products...and we can use them in the US!!

http://www.ecogreenunit.net/

Win-win for the "developed" and the "developing". As alwasy, open to your ideas.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Inspiration

May 2003, Oprah Magazine

Who would have thought an old David Hockney drawing would yield a hospital in India and a clinic in Mexico? Margit Bisztray profiles Michael Daube and his extraordinary organization, Citta.

In 1994 Artist Michael Daube was rummaging through a dumpster near his Jersey City loft, looking for sculpture materials, when he came across a drawing in a rickety frame signed with a funky initial. Having taken an art attribution course, he has an inkling that it might be a David Hockney. A professional confirmed his hunch, and Daube, then 30, sold his find for $30,000.

With his money, he took off for India, were he'd traveled six years earlier. The son of a steel worked and a housewife, neither a high school graduate - Daube had survived a sometimes turbulent family life by dreaming of cultures, far from his rural upstate New York home.

On his first trip, Daube was struck by the Buddhist concept of compassion - a love that makes one's own suffering and happiness inseparable from those of others - which he'd witnessed while working at Mother Teresa's mission in Calcutta. When he returned after the Hockney sale, he went back to Mother Teresa and asked her how he might practice compassion $18,000 richer. She suggested opening a school in the country's poorest, most heavily tribal state, rural Orissa. Prone to floods and cyclones, it's an area about which even devoted aid workers ask, "Why would you go there?"

Daube soon found out what they were talking about. "In Orissa, people with extremely sick babies approached me begging for any kind of medicine, even aspirin," he says. "I saw a man in a basket hanging from bamboo poles held by two skinny men who intended to carry him more than 18 miles through mud to the nearest hospital. Instead of building a school, I began to build a hospital."

It quickly became clear that Daube would need more money to complete the project, so he returned to New York in search of work. In a stroke of good fortune, a friend introduced him to musician David Byrne and artist Adelle Lutz, who ended up giving him odd jobs. ("They knew I could help with art projects as well as fix a fence," says Daube.) Over the next two years, he would work for Byrne and Lutz until he'd saved enough money, then travel back to Orissa to add a floor or roof to the hospital. In 1995 Byrne performed a concert to raise funds for a clinic he and his assistant convinced Daube to help them build, in Chiapas, Mexico, to serve the Mayans. With both projects to manage, Daube formed an organization he called Citta, the Sanskrit word meaning "mind-heart": soon director Jonathan Demme and actress Thandie Newton lent their support.

Most recently, Citta has thrown a lifeline to the poorest regions of Nepal, where woman used to leave newborns in the snow to die rather than watch them starve. Now mothers support their families making jewelry and doing bead and needlework commissioned by New York designers. More medical centers, as well as orphanages and schools, may follow. "After we are involved in a region, it usually becomes apparent what else is needed," says Daube. "Our approach is holistic. There is never just one aspect that allows a community to emerge from poverty."

These days Daube is on the road most of the time, but he has become the unofficial big brother to Babu, an eight-year-old Orissa boy. Abandoned in a temple as a child, Babu now hangs out at the hospital in Orissa, which serves 60,000 people, and he's learning to read at the newly completed school. From that original discovery of the Hockney, Daube has opened up an entire world of beauty and possibility.

http://www.citta.org/publicity.html

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Jai Bajrang Bali!!


















Ek, doa, Jai Bajrang Bali!! It took some serious muscle to unload the hardware.
(Jai Bajrang Bali is a phrase used to incarate the strength that Lord Hunuman has....big Hunuman fans in this part of Orissa.)






















...Although joking around in this pic, woman-muscle goes a long way too. ...i had great fun unloading stones and cement with them...They didn't hesitate in filling me up with dried tamrind snacks....way to take the mind off the mining concerns.

...I asked the ladies why they wanted light...why they actively gave their time to the project. Their reply: "If there was no project, we would not meet people like you. We would never know what is outside."

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Karlapat and Amthagouda

...I look up to see how far she needs to go...my eyes keep looking higher and higher until they finally find the forebay, at least half a kilometer of a climb away. She has 12 bricks on her head, held onto by two dark brown human limbs, nearly a photo-copy of a sapling's limbs. She climbs steadily, knowing her sweat is gradually giving her partial ownership to the new micro hydro system. Others in her family go searching for labor jobs in order to build the corpus fund required for the system. The jobs ofcourse are inextricably linked to the local "development", ie roads for new mining and dam work. Are we bringing them light or inevitable darkness?

...We have arrived after dark. The lights are on, but ironically I still cannot decipher all his features. He is Arjun, the boyish looking 20 yr old leader of the village. I am introduced as the 'madame replacing Michael'...I receive stares in response to the intro. I catch an older lady sprawled out on the patio of her cookie-cut, Gram Vikas built home. I interrupt the intros to ask what's happened. "She's over dosed on the local liquor." Nothing new I am told....but I was so happy to hear that Arjun was not going to accept drinking as a village ritual. Arjun and his co-leader are the only two in the village who do not drink. Three years ago, Arjun forced the gov't to close its nearby liquor shopt. If people made their own, he publicly tied and scolded any man that was drinking...his motivation in relieving the chaos that follows drinking resulted in a liquor free village for at least a year. Unfortunately the gov't has re-opened the shop. ...We talked about how evening activities could now be held with the new lights, in order to distract people from drinking. Hope they happen soon. ...We were there to look at the new lights...Arjun became the Light I had been searching for.

Such images in the villages of Karlapat (in process of getting a micro hydro system) and Amthagouda (has a newly finished micro hydro system), two tribal villages near Bhavanipatna (the town I am in now), Orissa, have occupied my mind and heart like no other during the last four days. They are teaching me about their will and my judgements.

The turbine and cable material arrived unexpectedly on-time. We will stay an extra week, until April 14 or so No email or phone.