Goats, hairy vegetables, smiles and smells.

The expression “welcome to India” needs to be modified to “Arghhhh! Welcome to fu**ing India (sorry Mum) you’d better have A LOT of patience and a high tolerance for bad smells and dirt – if not, you’re going to learn it!”. Nevertheless, it is an amazing country and as you find yourself sandwiched between 12 other people in the back of a VERY old converted Landrover discovery with a variety of mystery hairy knobbly vegetables and an arrogant looking goat you can’t help but giggle quietly to yourself… it really is like another world.



I’m coming up for the end of my second week here in Makaibari – I arrived a couple of Sundays ago and after a slightly nerve- wracking journey on two planes that looked and sounded like they were going to explode or fall apart at any second, I was met at Bagdogra airport by Ronan who co-ordinates voluntary projects in Makaibari with his wife Chitra. I was very suspicious and paranoid at this point and as I was expected Chitra to collect me, I was wondering if he'd bumped her off and was now going to smuggle me into some hut somewhere and sell my fingers and toes for handbag tassels. Anyway I took my chances and surprisingly, my suspicions were wrong! It was chucking it down with rain when I arrived and the journey from Bagdogra to Makaibari was terrifying!! We were in a tiny little car and as it wheezed and spluttered up the narrow roads and hairpin bends towards the Himalayas the driver honked the horn every ten seconds to alert other vehicles to our presence. I tried to avert my eyes from the views over the edge – one small swerve and we would have been sent plummeting thousands of feet to the plains below. At one point when I was feeling particularly terrified as the fog was so thick, the road was so steep and narrow and the rain was so heavy (and the windscreen wipers didn’t really work) Ronan decides to pipe up “hmm these other cars are probably really pissed off with us because we are going the wrong way up this one way road… OH BUT IT’S OK YES….we have it, a permit to go the wrong way, oh yes miss jessica. Right - I feel SO much safer now. Thanks. Haha! An hour or so later, we finally arrived at Makaibari tea estate and I was very glad to still be alive! I hauled my soaking wet backpack out of the boot (it had fallen out of the back of the car into a huge puddle probably filled with wee, poo and rainwater when the boot sprung open half way up a hill) and I was taken down a very rocky narrow pathway to the family I would be living with for the next month. I was greeted with the widest of smiles and instantly felt welcome. The family comprises the mother and father Bharati and Pema; their 2 daughters Ashwini (13) and Anjelina (5); The grandparents; a “cousin-brother” (lots of inter-relations here!!) whose parents live in Calcutta but he lives here so he can go to school; a dog called Chang-ba and a cat called Puss! They had two priests having dinner with them when I arrived and so they were all sat around the teeny table in the kitchen, lit by candlelight (no electricity) perching on plastic chairs (2 people per chair - one butt cheek per person) and blocks of wood on the floor. I sat and listened (they nearly had a heart attack when I tried to sit on the floor… I got my own stool!) and Pema spoke to me in English a little. I was then shown my room which on first impressions I was very happy with…. Until all the spiders materialized! Same goes for the bathroom, except on the first night I had the added bonus of a scorpion hiding behind the tap!! Anyhow, I have now got used to the bugs, going to the toilet in a hole and showering with a jug and a bucket of cold water. You soon learn what should be priorities in life and that you can actually survive without a top of the range power shower or a big deep hot bath filled with bubbles (I promise I am not dribbling at the thought… much)
On my first full day at Makaibari, I met Rajah Banarjee the 4th generation owner of Makaibari Tea Estate… what a character! So arrogant but in a harmless and amusing way. He is very passionate about biodynamic farming which is a very interesting concept… if you have time, google it… in particular Steiner’s teachings. He is a very spiritual man and a devout Hindu. He is very intelligent and knowledgeable and the sort of person you could listen to for hours, I enjoy his very unique character! He is permanently cracking bad jokes and generally being a little bit crazy and odd - I find him very funny! In the afternoon, I was given a tour of some of the tea estate by Raj, one of the villagers. Oh.My.God. I thought I was going to die on the walk back up to Makaibari factory… THAT was a hard walk! Little did I know that all of the walks around here are like that - I guess I should have realized that seeing as the estate is located at the foothills of the Himalayas! DOH! At least I will be fitter when I get home! The walks around here are stunningly beautiful (when you’re not completely blinded by fog/clouds…which sadly isn’t that often) and there’s so much wildlife to admire.
On Friday last week, Daniel, Lucy and I were invited to Rajah's house for dinner.. he had some other guests there - one of whom was an australian lady called Anne Norman who has written a book called Curiositea - she was ODD and she played some japanese flute instrument which was actually beautiful but I was trying really hard not to giggle as I thought of the jazz flute in Anchorman so I probably didnt enjoy it as much as I could have. Next in the entertainment for the evening was Mr Singh who decided to sign a hindi song for Rajah... sadly he had a VERY bad cold and as they dont have tissue paper around here he was disadvantaged and his song just came out as a variety of nose gurgles... i have to say the hand actions that accompanied the song were very entertaining though!
In terms of the voluntary work, there were no strict guidelines, I was basically told I can do whatever I wanted to do and not really given any guidelines so it was a bit tricky to start off… I started off helping out with the healthcare workers but the language barrier became a problem so I did some data analysis for them and turned some figures into graphs which they were very excited about and will apparently help them with ordering medicines and deciphering which health problems need to be addressed the most. I’ve also been helping out at the local library (with Rupa who works at the library full time –she is fab!) which was built by volunteers in 2008. The kids visit after school and I’ve been helping them with reading English and also just sitting with them whilst they colour/draw/play. It’s very rewarding – the kids are so excitable and cute and polite, I want to bring them all home with me!
I’ve also been organizing an art competition along with a couple of the other volunteers who are here – Daniel and Lucy - it will be held on 9th May for all the children in Makaibari and we’ve been getting prizes, art materials, drawing posters and putting them around the villages etc..
As some of you may know.. another project I have on the go is the water tank! Many of my lovely friends and family have donated money towards providing Makaibari with another water tank which will make a big difference to many of the villagers so I’m really grateful for the support.
There is no running water here (apart from at the factory as they have invested in a tank with a pump which brings water up to the factory from a stream way down in the mountains). Most people can only have one bath a week and the whole community is very careful with every drop of water used. Women and men of all ages have to hike miles every day to a water source in the middle of the forest in order to get their water supply for the day. Some people with larger families even get up at 2 or 3am every day to ensure they can get an adequate supply of water. I went to look at the water source and the walk back up the mountain was SOOOO hard, I can't even imagine what it must be like to do that every day with 30 litres of water on my head!!!! I think I would actually pass out! There aren't even any footpaths, it all takes careful balance on rocks up a very, very steep mountain! What we need to do is build a tank higher up from the water source I have mentioned above (where water flows out of the mountains but not at a very fast rate) water would be collected in the tank overnight and when there is rain and it would mean a) another water source would be utilised, helping to relieve the water shortage issue the community has and b) the less able (elderly etc) could walk a much shorter distance in the mornings to collect their water for the day. The paths are much easier to this point and the walk has less of a theme of 'hiking with a death-wish'. After discussions with some of the villagers, it seems that a plastic tank will be just as suitable as a cement tank and so yesterday was spent checking out the site again and then we took a trip to the nearest town and bartered for the cheapest tank, pipes, taps, connectors, cement, sand etc... Several frustrating hours later we safely (huchum) attached the watertank with one piece of string to the top of a taxi and transported it back to the tea estate along with all the other purchases!
The next stage is collecting some local stones to use to make a wall/dam to direct water at the site, and then we need to wait until one of the local masons and his assistant is available for a day or two in order to make the cement base and cement the tank in place. Hopefully I'll be able to be of assistance too although judging by the state of me yesterday after carrying bags of cement around, i'm going to need more than a cold water bucket bath afterwards! The grandmother of the family I am living with seemed to think the state of me was hilarious! I seem to be very entertaining around here! haha!
Last but not least…I am organizing a recipe competition in order to gather recipes from all the locals to turn into a recipe book which can then be sold to visitors and tourists and the money can be ploughed back into the community. I made some pretty posters and went and put them up in all the villages and I made forms for people to fill in. So far, quite a few forms have been collected from the library and lots of people have come to me asking questions/ talking about it so I’m quite excited about it all, I really hope it’s a success!
This week Sanjay gave me, Daniel and Lucy a tour of the tea factory which was fascinating and then I had a tea tasting session with Rajah and some ozzie dude who ran a tea import company in Melbourne - he was a bit of a knobber (he was wearing shiny purple trousers and my first impressions were correct once he opened his mouth and started spouting bullshit too) anyway the tea tasting was also really interesting… I am not sure if I’m going to be able to drink Tetley and PG Tips when I get home… I never realized what REAL tea tastes like and the benefits of it. Rajah also showed me a tea deva which is an insect which looks like a leaf… it was first discovered in 1991 in Makaibari and the first of it’s kind ever…worldwide. It’s amazing and it reflects the condition of the tea bush at the time so for instance, if the tea bush had a white spot fungus, the insect would have white spots on it. Apparently you only get tea devas in truly and wholly biodynamic farmed land.
Last weekend I went to Darjeeling with Daniel and Lucy. Darjeeling is beautiful and it was very luxurious to have a shower and be near some shops and civilization. It was pretty good timing as I had just run out of toilet paper and had to cut up one of my t-shirts to use as toilet paper! I then realized that there aren’t any bins around here… hmmm… interesting times! I got my clothes washed at the hotel we stayed at as my attempts at hand washing aren’t great! On Saturday night we went to Chitra and Ronan’s house for dinner (they live in Darjeeling) which was nice and then we went for a few beers in what seemed like the one and only pub in Darjeeling. Wow - we got some looks, especially when Lucy proceeded to do eagle and elephant impressions at full volume! The pub closed at 9pm!! When we got back to the hotel we discovered that it was Lucy’s birthday and so Daniel went on a mission with his Estonian friend Karel (who he’d met in Makaibari and was now in Darjeeling and by co-incidence staying at our hotel) to get some more beer… he returned an hour later (after Lucy and I had got bored and turned everything in his room upside down, hidden things in pillowcases and pulled a variety of other mature pranks) with half a bottle of whisky! Turns out he and Karel had been wandering the streets looking for an off license and some street vendor had overheard them, shouted out to them and sold them his own alcohol supply (1/2 a bottle of whisky) which he keeps behind his street stall!
On Sunday we went to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute which was really interesting and had lots of cool displays and information. You have to walk through Darjeeling zoo to get to the institute, which was also pretty cool – especially the wolves and the bears! We wanted to get the Himalayan Toy Train (UNESCO world heritage listed) back to Kurseong (the nearest town to Makaibari) but sadly it wasn’t running as it had been de-railed and damaged! So instead we bundled into a shared jeep with about 13 other people… a few hours later we arrived at Makaibari and I fell out of the back door with a very numb bum and a leg with pins and needles that felt the size of Africa.

I have to say the first week here in Makaibari was a challenge and I missed the western comforts of proper toilets, running water, constant electricity, shops, cars etc; I was frozen solid with fright of bugs and scorpions as I was lying in my bed at night trying to sleep and it took a bit of effort not to feel repulsed by the morning ritual that wakes me every day of the whole community of clearing their pleghm from their chests and throats onto the streets! Getting anything done here is such a mission, people invent their own terms, their own opening hours, their own names…. nobody seems to want to finish a task and the pace of life is so slow its almost at a full stop which I find a bit frustrating as I like to get things finished. Nevertheless, I am now adjusting to the lifestyle well and I feel like it’s worth it because I am starting to feel like I am actually making a difference here so I’m enjoying it. There are such rewarding moments especially when it comes to the kids. I'm even enjoying living like a dirty smelly hippy with dirt ingrained round my toes. Kinda fantasising about a bubblebath though.