LADAKH! (part 2)

On the second night in Nubra Valley, we were doing a homestay with a Ladakhi family. We arrived freezing down to our bones and just moving from the slightly warm position my friend and I had finagled ourselves into on the way to keep warm was extraordinarily difficult.

A school for boys at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh 

It's interesting, because I go to school in one of the coldest places in America; I should be able to handle a place that's considered cold in India. But the stark contrast between Ladakh and Appleton, WI is that there is virtually no heat in Ladakh. None. A few places will have a little heat, but at most it only warms up a few degrees Celsius, and it's only on a few hours a day, even in the nicer hotels. That adds a whole new factor to the equation.

Anyway, we went inside and in our dramatic (well, kind of) and overtired and overemotional state from hiking all day, we decided to sleep in a two-person bed with all three of us, and snuck into another room and took five more blankets we saw stacked there. We were genuinely terrified of the coldness at this point. And we decided to pile nine blankets on top of us. We spent forty-five minutes laughing harder than we ever have, arranging the blankets so that every inch of each of our shivering bodies would be adequately covered. Still, we wondered, seriously, how we were going to make it through the night. Like, we really wondered. It was that cold.

In the "city" of Leh in Ladakh!

When dinner was ready at 9pm, we stumbled into the dining room area and proceeded to eat another one of the best meals of our lives. Egg curry, rice and daal, chapati and aloo gobi - so, SO good.

After dinner, we went outside and I looked up to see one of the most breathtaking images I've ever laid my eyes on - the night sky above the Himalayas. It's something very hard to describe - the beauty of all those millions of stars shining down on you. We laid down on the barren earth and took it all in with all its glory.

The next morning we woke up to find that we had, indeed, survived through the night. We woke to the sound of om being chanted repeatedly on the hillside near the house. Not wanting to interrupt the precious moment of gratitude and awe, we quietly rolled out of bed, wrapped ourselves up in the cocoon of our humongous new yak wool scarves we had bought in Leh for about three hundred rupees each (that's about four dollars), and made our way outside into the cold air for breakfast of Ladakhi bread and butter.

The next day we did our biggest hike of the trip: to Rumbakh, a tiny Himalayan village in the middle of nowhere that is only accessible by hiking. I was pretty worried because I knew I was dehydrated, and I was worried that a big hike would be too much in the freezing cold and in this crazy altitude.

It was hard, for sure. I had trouble breathing at some points and felt light-headed and dizzy a few times. But when that happened, I would simply look around me at the stunning beauty of the mountains I was surrounded by, and trudge on a bit longer.

When we finally arrived, I was exhausted. We got to our homestay house and I realized how incredibly cool this all was - staying in a small Himalayan mountain village that has no road access and a population of, like, thirty people. That's pretty amazing.

Rumbakh - the Himalayan mountain village we did a homestay in 

A weird thing was that the woman we were staying with - Gobi - had a television set. I didn't understand this, but I was pretty used to being floored by most of what I saw at this point in the trip. As she made dinner by setting cow dung patties on fire in her small cast-iron stove with a flat rock on top of it to make the chapati on - we snuggled together under the huge blankets in her kitchen. It felt so good to be a little warm again that I almost started crying of happiness.

Our guide Kruttika came in to make sure we were okay in our homestay house. She sat for a few minutes and talked with us, and I asked if this woman, Gobi, who couldn't speak any English or even Hindi, the Indian national language, had ever been outside of Rumbakh. Kruttika wasn't sure, but she did say that this woman, and the other people of this village and others like it, had practically no form of identification or any kind of "official" existence (whatever that means). That blew my mind; we, with our crazy lives that are so over documented in the U.S., cannot begin to fathom what that would really be like.

Gobi fiddled with the remote for a few minutes, assuming that we would want to watch TV. She came to the only channel in English, and left it on that. You won't believe what it was - of all things, Cupcake Wars. We nearly died of laughter. Here we were, in the Himalayan mountains, so far off the grid and so far from civilization that the woman we were living with had quite possibly never left her village in her entire life, and we were watching Cupcake Wars on TLC. Gobi watched as the foreign people on the screen ran around frantically spewing florescent pink frosting on top of piles and piles of cupcakes, arranged in the shape of a pirate ship. The look on her face was one of awe; her eyes were glued to the screen in a way I had never seen two eyes do before. The stark contrast between that life and this life was almost too much to take in so quickly with no prior warning. It was a crazy scenario, but I'll never forget it as long as I live. 

The next day we hiked back to Leh early in the morning. We spent our last night in a hotel in Leh. Saying goodbye was hard, but I did miss Pune at that point was also excited to get back. 

A woman in Rumbakh getting water from the communal well 

We flew from Ladakh to Delhi, then I took a 24-hour train ride from Delhi to Pune with the guide and one other member of our trip, which I did to save money on another flight, but also because I love trains and was interested to see what one would be like in India. 

It was fascinating. I witnessed with my own eyes people bribing the ticket collectors to let them on the train even though they didn't have tickets. Whole families, after getting passed this stage, would sleep near the bathrooms or in hallways with a single blanket over their heads and bodies. It was insanity. Getting to see such a vast area of India was really cool, too. We went through Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and much of Maharashtra to get all the way to Pune. 

LADAKH! (part 1)

For Diwali break, which is kind of the equivalent to Christmas/Holiday break in the Western world, we get ten days off from school to travel wherever we so choose. I wanted to go somewhere amazing, since this is really our only time to go wherever we want, that hasn't been scheduled into our semester. I decided to go to Ladakh because I wanted to see a whole new side of India, and I wanted to do something that wouldn't be easy to do by myself if I ever come back (fingers crossed!). Ladakh is an area of Jammu & Kashmir in northern India, right near the China border that is known throughout the country as being one of the most beautiful places on earth. The Himalayas are sprawled within it and its Buddhist culture gives it a different flavor than the rest of India.

Ladakh stole my heart the minute I stepped off the plane. I was in kind of a worried/anxious/generally upset mood on the plane ride and in the airport because I had managed to convince myself that I had Dengue Fever (any minor ache, pain, cough, or sneeze in India triggers some huge frenzy worrying about malaria or Dengue or some other disease) and was worried about my ability to hike in the Himalayan mountains in my condition. But it all went away when I stepped into the crisp, biting air of this new 16,000 foot altitude I would be living in for the next ten days.
But the initial excitement was soon buried under more worry. I was absolutely freezing, my fingers were tingling like crazy because of the medication we were told to take to help our bodies adjust to the altitude, I was concerned about getting dehydrated because I had already run out of all the bottled water I had stashed away from the plane, and the sharp pain in my side that I had been feeling for a few days was coming on stronger.

For the first twenty-four hours, it is required that all new visitors take rest, even very experienced hikers. We had to walk up stairs very, very slowly, and I found that I was tremendously out of breath after climbing all of four stairs. It was pretty scary, honestly.

The first night we had dinner at a totally barren place that had no electricity in the main room for some reason, and so we ate by candlelight. I don't think food had ever brought me so much joy until then - the warm soup and the hot rice and daal was so good compared to my freezing cold and hungry state. Our hotel did not have heat during the night, so my best friend and I snuggled together under our thousand massive blankets and eventually managed to fall asleep.

We visited many monasteries and it was gorgeous and surreal. We met monks, almost fell off a few cliffs in our car that was driven by our crazy driver Hussein, and ate lots of maggi, which is essentially Ladakh's version of Ramen noodles. A few days into the trip, we went over the highest motorable road in the world, at 18,380 feet!

We went to Pangong Lake, 70% of which is in China and 30% of which is in India. We had lunch at one of the small places nestled at Pangong, which seemed to be owned by a mother and her two small children, one of which was a baby strapped to her back while she ran around cooking food. Her son was the sole waiter, and he couldn't have been more than seven years old. Seeing him wash our dishes with his bare hands in ice cold water was a bit much to grapple with, and peering into the part of the small, makeshift restaurant that they called home to see the two small blankets on the floor and not much else was hard to take in. I had seen a lot of heartbreaking scenes like this back in Pune and at our other destinations, but this one was exacerbated by the fact that it was so, so cold outside. It just made the whole situation sting a little more than usual.

There's a line in my journal that kind of sums this feeling up: "the number of lives you could have been born into on this planet really scares me." 

True. 

The whole experience kind of turned my earned environmentalism on its head. For the first time in my life, I saw firsthand how scary the outdoors can be, and how easy it is to forget that nature can be ruthless and harsh and doesn't really care too much. 

We went to Nubra Valley on the sixth day. It was stunningly beautiful and utterly amazing. The military presence was real and a bit intimidating at times. We met two guys from Slovakia who were professional para-gliders, and spend two months in Nubra Valley every year doing it. They were fascinating and the rest of the group had to pull me away by the end of our conversation. 

We also got to go camel riding in Nubra Valley! This was so, so cool partly because camels are freaking awesome but also because they looked so different from the camels I think of in my head. They were super furry and absolutely massive. With the Himalayan mountains as the back drop, it was really quite a sight: 

And one more because I just can't help myself:

Shadowing a SWaCH Waste Picker

 I was extremely excited about shadowing a SWaCH member. I ended up shadowing a husband and wife – both of whom are SWaCH waste-pickers. I shadowed Dilip, the husband, for the first half of the day, and his wife Supriya for the second half of the day. 

SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling), where I interned during my semester abroad!

Neither of them spoke any English, so I was not able to ask questions or bring up comments or observations until afterward when I went over the experience with my adviser and other SWaCH members. It was an extraordinary experience that I will never forget and it gave me invaluable insight into the power of belonging to a cooperative such as SWaCH.

            Dilip and Supriya are a married couple who have been waste-picking their whole lives. Becoming members of SWaCH changed their lives completely. Dilip was able to get a small truck – a tempo – which gives him enormous capabilities that most waste-pickers only dream of. Dilip and Supriya are wealthy as far as waste-pickers go, and have managed to put their three sons through school and beyond. The oldest son is twenty-two and is studying to be a police officer. They may not be well-off, but they are also not just scraping by day-to-day.

He picked me up in his little blue truck and we were off to his first stop of the day – a Toyota Dealer in Pune. For seven thousand rupees per month, Dilip takes care of all of the waste for this entire operation. I wanted to talk to the manager about his experience working with SWaCH, and he explained, delightedly, that he switched to SWaCH because he knew that they have the capacity to recycle. The previous private company he hired to collect the waste did not necessarily recycle everything, and he felt compelled to move his company towards a greener future. I asked him why he felt so compelled do take this step, and he showed me an email that he had sent out to all of his employees that outlined the Swatch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India) movement, and how Toyota would be complying with its principles. He wanted to give his company a good name in light of all this, and thought that moving toward a greener waste management process was a good start. I asked him how much and what kinds of waste his dealership produces, and he said that it is mostly organic waste, of which most is food waste – approximately ninety to one hundred kilograms per day. Dry waste accounts for about ten to fifteen kilograms per day.

            After rounding up all this waste, Dilip and I got back into the little blue truck and went to the “sorting shed” – if you can even classify it as that. It was in reality a pile of garbage on the side of a semi-busy road with no privacy and no coverage. The dry waste that he had collected would be sorted through at the end of his work day, and the wet waste would be given to a biogas plant.

            It was at the sorting shed that I met his wife, Supriya, for the first time. She was a ball of beaming energy that was incredibly warm and absolutely delightful from the moment we met. Supriya and I walked to the housing society from which she collects household garbage. She pushed her pushcart with two large garbage bins in it – one for wet waste and one for dry waste – in front of her, and lovingly but firmly held my hand tightly at every street we crossed.

Supriya and her SWaCH waste collection cart, with one bin for wet waste and one bin for dry waste 

            The housing society from which she collected waste had about two hundred stand-alone homes (i.e. not bungalows or apartments) and she collected the garbage from most of them in about ninety minutes, which was very impressive. Most had put their waste out in front of their homes, but some kept it inside. She knew everyone, for the most part, on a first name basis, and greeted everyone with a huge smile.

            Most of the households had segregated their waste to a basic degree, but it was done pretty carelessly most of the time from what I observed. Supriya spent probably an extra half hour or more by the end of the collection segregating wet from dry waste. It was during this that I saw first-hand the enormous importance of segregating household waste; had the people taken that extra half second to carefully segregate their waste at the source – in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in the yard or garden – Supriya would have saved a lot of time as well as some dignity by not having to sort through other people’s garbage more than was absolutely necessary for her job.

Me, Supriya, Dilip (back right) and a Pune Municipal Council (PMC) worker who came to pick up the day's non-recyclables to bring to the landfill 

            The people who I interacted with that lived in the homes Supriya was collecting from were all very fond of SWaCH and satisfied with their experience thus far. Many were very confused by my presence, of course, and a few were slightly annoyed that I was studying a garbage system that was, according to one man, “a complete mess.” He began genuinely telling me that they – India – should be learning from us, instead of me learning from them. I politely explained that the U.S. has a garbage crisis, too, and that it is simply more hidden than the garbage crisis in India, which is unabashedly out in the open. He wasn’t especially interested in that, though.

            One woman that Supriya collected garbage from was extremely interested in what I was doing and wanted to know all about my project and my observations on the Pune waste system. She gave me lots of TED talks to watch and articles to read and brochures to go through, and by the end Supriya had to tear us apart. I asked her what her experience with SWaCH waste-pickers specifically was and she replied with, “they are our heroes, actually.”

            Supriya did other things besides just collect the wet and dry waste from people’s homes. Some homes – about five or six – had composting facilities outside their home that Supriya turned. A few were vermicomposting units – which is the use of earthworms to convert organic waste into fertilizer – and a few were just regular composting units. She also swept the walkways to some houses and picked up any trash she saw littered outside of the property.

            I was surprised by the ignorance of some people who had well-meaning intentions. The first example of this was a young woman who seemed to be an activist in waste-picker welfare issues. She explained to me that she does not give Supriya plastics because she knows that waste-pickers have to manually go through plastics to sort them into sup-categories. She did not want to make Supriya do this, so she sold her plastic recyclables directly to a scrap dealer. Though her intentions in this act were dutiful and well-intentioned, she missed the point completely that Supriya makes half her income off of selling these plastics and other recyclable material to the scrap dealer. Though she was saving Supriya from manual labor, she failed to understand that this is, alas, how Supriya makes her living – whether this woman wants it to be this way or not. Being properly educated about how SWaCH works and how waste-pickers work is vital, and it was frustrating – yet understandable – that many people had not taken the time to accurately educate themselves.

            When Supriya was done collecting waste from these two hundred homes or so, we made our way back to the “sorting shed” where I had met her earlier. We met up with Dilip, who had already begun the sorting for the day. There was also another married couple who was busy sorting at the same place. The other woman knew some English, and we were able to talk a little bit with this and my limited Marathi.

Supriya began the day’s sorting here. Waste-pickers sort waste into several categories, depending on the content of that day’s trash: plastic, paper/cardboard, cloth, leather, metal, and more. Each of these categories gets further sub-divided according to its recyclability and what kinds of things it will be made into in its next life. Plastic, for example, is divided into three main categories, initially: Main, which consists of all kinds of colored plastic bags; kadkad, which consists of PET bottles, Bisleri and other manufactured drinking bottles, plastic jars, ice creams cups, and other things of this nature; phuga, which consists of dirty/broken plastic bottles, low grade plastic, broken plastic toys, old oil bottles, shampoo bottles, and other things like this.[1] Different piles are made according to this system, and the waste-picker will get different rates for each type of recyclable. A waste picker will store the recyclables in the sorting shed (or wherever she can find room) and bring them to a scrap dealer about once a week.

            I had the opportunity to go to Supriya’s house after the day was over. The slums of Pune are interesting places with a wide variety in terms of living conditions. The small house was home to her, Dilip, their three sons, Supriya’s brother and his family of four, and Supriya’s sister and her family of four. Thirteen people were living in this house, which had a total of three rooms. It was a pretty crazy thing to witness.

            After this we walked back to SWaCH and she dropped me there. It was a truly amazing day that I will never, ever forget, and I am forever grateful for Dilip and Supriya’s kindness and openness.

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