I first become awake this morning at precisely 5:58 when a Ladakhi student rings their morning wakeup bell exactly two minutes early. The bell, nothing more than a square shaped slice of iron played with a small section of steel piping, hangs on a stick directly above the earthen cell rooms in which we (staff) live. The nice thing about this routine is that the six o’clock bell is what actually wakes me from the night’s slumber but for another 20 or so minutes I lie peacefully, contemplating the idea of the getting up and what shall come of the day. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly in that some mornings I close my eyes refusing to acknowledge the light and roll back to sleep until just before seven. But lately, with the light starting to filter in around 6:15, I am more and more able to go through this gradual, natural wake up without the lazy lapse back into dream space.
So take today for example. The bell rings and I open my eyes. Immediately I take in the intimate context of my very personal surroundings; the sagging ceiling, the adobe walls, the brightly colored fabric adorning the narrow shelves. I live in a cell, literally, eight by six feet with two small windows and a door. The door opens onto the stone walkway that separates the cell rooms from the garden beds, which currently are home to several bushy rows of chard. I prop my head up on the makeshift but extremely comfortable pillow, usually my down jacket stuffed in a cotton t-shirt. My eyes are pleased by the sight of the cluttered colorful interior of my cellular home. I feel tired but do not succumb to the temptation to persist dreaming. I manage to roll from my low lying and overly narrow sleeping apparatus at around 6:20. Placing my feet upon the carpeted mud floor, I then proceed to throw on the same old fleece pants and shirt that I’ve been wearing all week (laundry is drying on the fence), grab my tooth brush, towel and open the cell room door taking my first few refreshing breathes of the damp cool morning air of the greenhouse’s interior. I slowly walk the stone path preparing to throw open the main door and behold the eastern skyline of the Ladakh range, as the sun is streaming from behind the jagged ridges some 50 kilometers away. Nowadays, it is warm enough at this hour to linger on the driveway, casually absorbing the new day’s light and air while remarking internally upon how profoundly pleasant it is to see the sun rise over the Himalayas and start one’s day in this manner.
Continuing then on my journey east I head up and over the slight hill of the driveway arriving in less than a minute at the flap door of the bathroom complex, also a south facing, half greenhouse, half earthen barracks type structure. The main row of sinks, contained within the exterior greenhouse side of the structure, is connected by another stone pathway to yet another row of garden beds. This whole space becomes exceedingly hot during the afternoon, so much that so that I can easily work up a sweat doing my laundry before heading into the interior side of the structure where the shower rooms are located. Still the morning is cool but no longer cold. I turn on the tap from the sinks and - as of last week - the water flows forth freely. No more hauling buckets from the spring as the great March thaw has now penetrated all of the campus plumbing, including the kitchens and bathrooms. As James, my co-teacher pointed out yesterday, it is actually quite a blessing that we began here under dire conditions of extreme cold and cold related breakdowns, for now that the campus is alive with warmth and Spring activity, our appreciation for functional plumbing and the rest of the homespun ecological infrastructure is all the more. In the peak of the afternoon, it is indeed quite luxurious to bath in three gallons of nearly steaming solar heated water. But for now, I take a few splashes of cold water and pat my face dry with a cotton towel, which for some reason provides amazing satisfaction like nowhere else. One level more awakened I now return to the cell room complex for tea making and further preparations.
Our community kitchen is conveniently located at the last room of the far (eastern end) of the cell complex. When I open the door, I nearly trip over one of the two campus cats, who is exiting on my right just as I enter. These cats are fairly annoying with their continuous loud and high pitched meowing, except of course when they are eating or committing some food related mischief. God only knows why they are always making such a fuss when they certainly seem to be eating more than their fair share, relative to all the other intentional and accidental members of the community including, cows, chickens, semi-wild dogs, and a few crafty mice that inhabit the kitchen wall closest to the slop bucket. Incidentally, not a drop of food, or biomass for that matter, is wasted here in Ladakh. Without having experienced many other high altitude deserts, I would venture to say that this place in general practices the most complete and waste-less form of resources consumption out of anywhere on the planet. Here at SECMOL, cows and chickens are fed every last food scrap from onion peels to egg shells. As a result, there is no such thing as kitchen compost, only that of the toilets. Ladakhis are not able to practice cover cropping (the tilling under of half grown grasses and leguminous stalks) for they believe, and rightly so, that no green matter should be used for fertilizer if it could be used as animal fodder instead. This is not to say that green manure would not be a great benefit to the soil fertility of the region, but simply that the animals are a much higher nutritional priority. As a result of these culturally defined ecological practices and my own breakfast habits, I’m quite certain that the SECMOL cows have daily been consuming a very healthy meal of green tea leaves and crushed ginger amongst other bits of stale bread, lentils, and the occasional smattering of apricot jam.
Our community kitchen is small swampy little place with low ceilings, rickety tables, a makeshift sink with a drain I constructing entirely out of used bottles and scrap sections of plastic piping, but nonetheless, it has proven to be an enormously popular gathering spot for groups of Vermonsters and Ladakhis alike. With the tea boiled and a generous spoonful of fragrant Kashmiri honey added, I proceed out the door of the kitchen and plop my self down on the mud brick wall separating the pathway from the garden beds in order to sip my tea and stare off into space. Or, if I’m in a particularly jazzed up morning mood, I’ll read or write down dreams. Either way, this fifteen minutes of focused sitting, sipping, and staring is quite appreciated as I think of all the myriad other things I could be doing with morning time were I somewhere else…
Finally, the cup of tea is empty and I look at my watch. It’s 7:00 so I now proceed up to do a little bell ringing of my own. I take note of the quality of my rings and the expression contained within each tone and meter of the whole episode. This bell signifies that yoga class will be starting soon, and for many of the VISpas also serves as their last call to get out of bed. Yoga is of course optional, and most mornings draws about 5-7 students. It’s actually the first time in my life that I have had such a regular practice, and so I am quite grateful and indebted to the ones who initially asked me to do it, and to those who continue in persisting so that it has indeed become a regular feature of the program and something that I actually look forward to. The class is relatively short, only 45 minutes or an hour depending on how late we start and how hungry we are when the breakfast bell rings sometime between 8:15 and 8:30, but we compensate for time with intensity. My teenage students are surprisingly eager to be put through the wringer of ample jump backs and inversions and contortions that I would have certainly dreaded at 7 in the morning when I was 16. But alas this is Ladakh and the light is so pure and there is really nothing else to do until it warms up and they tell me starting the day with yoga makes them feel more awake and alive throughout, so I concur. We continue to learn more asanas, develop the whole breathing thing, meditate for a few minutes, chant om together and occasionally do the whole routine while listening to some nasty hiphop such as this morning’s Eardrum by Talib Kweli. Again it seem to be all about appreciation from afar, contrasts between old and new.
After Yoga, we’re already late for breakfast, which if it is extremely popular as it was with today’s chapatti, butter and homemade apricot jam, then we run the risk of missing out entirely. We arrived in the kitchen at 8:25 to discover breakfast was finished and none had been saved. In another more volatile setting, this incident could possibly have created waves of discontent, but fortunately we easily decided to head back to the community kitchen to make our own meal of eggs, onions, and spinach (from five feet away), topped off by generous dollops of the Velveeta-like canned - yes canned in a New Delhi factory - cheese. All this for six people in 20 minutes, leaving just enough time to make it over to the main building where our morning meeting had already begun in the VIS classroom.
The order of our classes is flexible. Yesterday, English was first. James opened with an in-class writing exercise on the concept of emptiness, which we have been eagerly applying to our studies of Buddhist history, philosophy and literature. Next came a discussion of Rushdie’s short story, the Hair of the Prophet, as part of a larger author and context study relating to the history of the Kashmir Valley. As a first year teacher working with such amazingly motivated and intelligent students, James has been able to successfully launch many facets of an English curriculum that is both thematic in its approach and intimately analytical in regards to the place based literature he has chosen. The students perpetuate the open ended discussion while at the same time they are continually pushing to find the discreet knowledge buried within the English curriculum and bring in out in workshop format.
In history class, which followed yesterday at 10:20, we began with Tess’ (student led) discussion on the Indian and J&K state constitutions in order to better understand the special provisions of autonomy originally set out for the state of J&K.. We are currently reading a brilliant analytical account of the now 60-plus year conflict surrounding the Kashmir Valley and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, of which Ladakh is the unspoken third part. When I first came across this book, written by an Indian born, Oxford educated, Harvard published author named Sumantra Bose, I was completely taken aback by how effective it was in both its educational-informative approach and the objective analysis. But by no means is it a dryly written scholarly text that could only be read by a select population. From my personal reading of this book, I was convinced that not only was it entirely appropriate for high school students but that there was an overwhelming reason to read it during our place based semester on Ladakh. Indeed the 60-year dispute over the sovereignty of the Kashmir Valley and the legitimacy of India’s claim on the entire state’s allegiance is extremely convincing in and of itself. In addition to the chronological facts leading up to and following independence, Bose provides an unavoidably compelling (emotional) window into the outrage created by India’s near complete denial of democratic rights to the citizens of J&K and its violent repression of political activity in the Valley for past 60 years. One cannot help but feel some understanding if not compassion for the reluctant secessionists of the Valley who took nearly 40 years and two generations of hope to finally be transformed into the armed rebels that have become commonly known today as simply militants. The author also clearly identifies the Jacobin tendencies of the original Kashmiri political leadership led by Sheik Abdullah in its formative years as major factor leading toward the corrupt authoritarian style of government that followed and later became its trademark. And similarly, the reader comes away with an unbiased and extraordinarily accurate perspective (if such a thing is possible) on the nature of Pakistan’s thorn-in-the-side, provocateur role in initiating each of the three successive wars with its goliath neighbor as well as supporting and sustaining the armed separatist groups of the Valley. Though Pakistan and the Kashmiri groups themselves have not exactly been role models of democratic freedom, it is overwhelmingly clear that with India lies the root causes of the conflict as well as the main responsibility and capacities for finding its resolution. As the model of secular democracy in the region, there was hope all along and continues to be to this day, that India might successfully bring J&K separatists of the Hurriyat Conference along with Pakistani leadership and paramilitary groups to the table for a lasting dialogue and reconciliation process that will once and for all address the grievances and borders that have remained unsettled since October 1947. The class dialogue created around this book has thus been difficult and passionate with no shortage of questions both factual and conceptual. Next week we move into a comparative study with several other contemporary ethno-regional conflicts – Bosnia, Israel Palestine, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland - with the goal of bringing about a clearer understanding of how these strains are fundamentally not limited to one religion or another, but that they are universal and the solutions themselves are present and attainable through sustained and systematic efforts at cooperation and mutual understanding…
After History, it’s tea (sweet with milk as opposed to salty with butter) time from 11:15-11:30, though lately most of us have opted out due to the unpleasant taste and smell of the cow’s milk which most theorize is due to the cows being fed copious quantities of semi rotten onions. Sweet teatime, with or without actually consuming, provides a casual transition before work hour starts at 11:00. Work hour yesterday was particularly varied, with at least seven different groups of students (always intercultural), consisting of 5-7 members each. One of the main ongoing work hour projects of the past week, and one that I have chosen to be diligently involved in, is the shoveling out of two (of the six) composting toilets and transporting the mostly well-composted humanure out to the fields in front of the kitchen. The traditional Ladakhi compositing toilets have been improved upon here at SECMOl in that each toilet here has two lower (catchment) chambers so that one can be filled while the other is full and decomposing for up to one year. Each chamber is approximately 5 by 10 feet long and nearly 15 feet high. Needless to say, the process of chopping down one of these fecal mountains and shoveling out the subsequent “tailings” takes a little bit of getting used to. Though I am generally open to new experiences and adventurous, I still find myself protesting quite vocally when the pick ax strikes an uncomposted and downright moist area of this supposedly two year old pile. For the most part thought, the system works. Each new delivery is mixed from above with a shovel of dirt, straw, and/or cow manure, thereby making for a balanced carbon-nitrogen product, which, as it exits the lower chamber via our shovels and axes, shows barely a trace of its original form. There is however a distinct humanure scent, that lingers and at times wells up to the point of making me question the sanity and sanitation of the whole process. But again this is Ladakh and the reality is our food intake is generally quite simple, healthy, chemical-free, and whatever bacteriological/viral content that exists in the manure would have a much better chance of contaminating the kitchen than the garden, the wheel barrow or the shovel handles. Point is that we accept it and acknowledge that this really is a solution that so many western environmentalists like to advocate, but that we are actually practicing it and learning its pros and cons and hopefully improving upon the age old technique so as to make it safer, more effective, and even competitive in the modern context.
Most other work hour projects are currently revolving around the preparation of our next major science project, the new solar hot water heater. The biggest component of the prep stage will be the mud brick production. One group of students has been filtering fine clay from a streambed on the far eastern side of the campus and hauling sacks of this raw material over to the framing and drying area near to the water heater construction site. Some students have just now begun mixing the clay with 5% cement, which is not the traditional method, but in this case will ensure that the super structure of the water heater will be solid and completely impermeable. Next phase is to mix in the water and begin pouring the batter into 3 by 5 inch molds and laying them in the sun to dry for one week. When we return from our trek next week, we’ll have about 200 bricks with which to begin the layered construction of the heater. The walls will consist of bricks, surrounded by copious amounts of waste plastic insulation, followed by an exterior surface of mortar to trap the heat and block the effects moisture. On the inside of the brick structure, we’ll lay down the black ceramic tiles we so faithfully hauled (as carry on luggage) from Delhi back at the beginning of the semester. Once the interior is seal
ed and the plumbing has been installed, we’ll design and construct the plastic frame and over-house to provide the necessary extra insulation needed throughout the winter months. All of this should be completed during the two weeks after we return from our next trek and before the final exhibitions begin.
Up above the bathroom complex, another group of students are installing new plastic water storage tanks to replace the old array which we’re located inside the bathhouse directly above the interior row of sinks. Wangchuk and the original designers of the school had felt strongly that old steel (oil) barrels should be used whenever possible as they would otherwise become waste. Unfortunately over the years, the amount of labor and time required to repair leaks sprung at rusty seams and welded jo
ints has far outweighed the original goal of conservation and waste reduction. With the new insulated array of plastic tanks, the system will be much simplified and hopefully require far less energy in maintenance.
Beyond these infrastructure projects, work hour is also the time to knock off major group cleaning operations, such as hand-washing all the curtains in the school, of which there are many many used to regulate the solar heating systems’ windows and doors. Mostly though, the r
est of the daily maintenance, cleaning of bathrooms, animal related chores, managing of stocks and supplies is all conducted during the half hour responsibility period that immediately precedes breakfast lunch or dinner depending on the nature of one’s responsibility. These responsibilities also include the more paperwork-based duties of running the hostel’s accounts, shopping for food and supplies, running the school canteen, and managing the whole of the operations between SECMOL students VIS students and staff. All in all the campus is indeed student run. We teachers find ourselves in slightly more flexible rolls as we make suggestions and offer input, but in the end are completely integrated into the equitable work sharing systems that have been developed here over the past 15 years. In terms of work sharing and responsibility, there really is no separation here based on status or authority of any of the members, and in that way it is indeed one of the most democratic and participatory communities I have ever witnessed.
