Something skewiff about skew. (Return to Ladakh, part 2)

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This blog covers the period Nov 8-14,2009.

I’m getting to know a few of the students’ names now. Six (four girls and two boys) out of the 38 are called “Stanzin” which should help but doesn’t. Their photos are also all hung up in the kitchen but I only discovered this fact this week, and some aren’t easily recognisable from their photos. There’s a few other first names shared by two or three kids, and two girls have exactly the same name (first name and surname). I guess Ladakhi just doesn’t have enough names to go round. I still don’t know most of their names, but at least I can recognise nearly all the students now, so I bet if I stayed another week or two after this one I’d have most of the names down pat. Really we only see most of them for a few hours a day, although we’re around them all the time but much of the rest of the time most of them are talking to each other in Ladakhi so it’s not such quality time.

I’m getting a little bored, we do about two hours of conversation classes a day and then there’s usually an English-language movie or some games in English or such-like, but after lunch there’s not really much to do. Some of the other volunteers sit in on some of the classes but they’re at least half in Ladakhi and so not too interesting. I kind of thought I’d have a little bit more to do. I’d be happy to teach them some stuff, particularly the areas where nobody’s teaching them anything, but since I’m leaving at the end of this week I’m not going to fight to do so. The “computer” class is horrible, all they do is use a typing tutor program, without anyone even telling them how to type properly let alone do anything computer-related. They have no idea how to find files or anything. I think they should at least have an idea of what Microsoft Word is or how to use Excel, but with the long-term volunteers not knowing this themselves (!) and the teachers too busy, it’s not much point me starting.

We only had two days of classes last week, since they were away on the excursion Sunday to Tuesday, and they had Thursday and Friday off for their presentations. Officially they only have one day off a week and it varies between Saturday and Sunday. This means, as far as I can work out, that they have a five-day week followed by a seven-day week. As luck would have it, despite only having two days’ of classes last week, this week is a five-day week, meaning that Saturday is the day off, so that in fourteen days of being here, I’ve had seven days of classes. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I still think SECMOL does a good job, but I just thought us volunteers would be doing a bit more.

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For people who are on facebook and saw my message saying I wouldn’t be online for two weeks and are wondering how last week I managed to post two blogs - on the day off (Sunday) most of us headed into Leh. The SECMOL campus is about three kilometres off the sealed road, a bit over 20 km from Leh. Because so many staff, volunteers and students were going into Leh they were able to arrange a bus to come to the campus, so I had a bit of time on the Internet, although, obviously, about two hours’ less time than I would have had if the bus had arrived on time. At least we didn’t have to sit on the roof this time.

On the way, one girl asked me to explain some stuff from her Year 12 Political Science textbook. Her English is so poor I couldn’t work out - despite really trying - if her exam was the next day or three weeks later. She was leaving SECMOL for three weeks for exams so who knows. Anyway, the textbook was written in perfectly correct but quite obfuscated English, so she really had no hope. I don’t remember the examples but the bit I was trying to explain was about five different philosophies of what “law” is. One sentence said something like “Smith holds that law is a system governing individual external actions enforced by a legitimate political authority”. That’s not quite it but I specifically remember the phrase “external actions” because I myself couldn’t work out what that meant. What other sort of actions are there? I assumed it was because no-one can make a law about what you think (although they can try: being atheist is illegal in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries). After I’d explained “holds”, “system”, “governing” , “individual”, “external actions” , “legitimate” and “authority” she’d forgotten them all and I had to start again, which meant I never even got to completely explain the one in which some other authority claims that the ancient Indian “sages” “propounded” that law is found in the concept of “Dharma” (ironic that she was one of the few Muslim students) which “nurtures and sustains” the “universe”. With textbooks like that and teachers who don’t speak English, the kids in the public school system are really up against it.

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It was a freezing morning. I was washing a lot of clothes, in almost-freezing water in a bucket and under a tap. I had a lot of washing and some of it was very dirty. After half an hour or so I stopped for a bit to thaw out my hands and looked across the valley. There were a couple of mountains there. One didn’t look too hard to climb. “I want to climb that mountain” I said. The more we talked about it and looked at the mountain, the more difficult it seemed. The first difficulty was getting across the river. That afternoon me and the man with the bible reference tattooed on his wrist walked downstream to scope out the possibility of crossing the river, which would be the first hurdle. We ascertained that there were no places to cross. There were places you could swim across if you had a penchant for hypothermia, but nowhere where you could walk across even in water up to your waist. We walked along the river for some time until the track ended in a gorge. This seemed a let-down for me. I looked up on our side and there was a bit of a mountain there too. A scree slope lead almost to the top. It looked as if one could walk up it. “It looks as if it would crumble under your weight” said bible verse man. Who knew that someone so bad at predicting what sort of tattoo would look cool could be so good at predicting what would happen with scree?

He was happy for me to try though, so I clambered up. I found a place where the rocks were thicker and more solid, most probably between 20-80 cm across. Before long I reached a spot where there was a little track leading along contour of the slope. I don’t know if it was a track, I don’t think so, but I’m not sure how else it got there, perhaps it was a deer track. At some places it seemed to touch the original bedrock of the mountain. I walked along it for a bit and then things started to slip a bit.

With normal walking on steep rocks and that sort of thing, I know that you’re supposed to keep your centre of gravity low. Basically, you lean into the hill. I did this, and the big rock I was standing on, which had felt solid, shifted a few centimetres. I found another one to hold onto but it too moved if I put too much weight on it. The little rocks around me were sliding all over the place. I looked down and it was about 70 metres at an angle much steeper than 45 degrees down to the river, which looks very high from up there. I wondered if I’d be able to slide down into the river safely if I started a landslide. I had no idea. I slowly was able to turn around without dislodging anything too much, after digging into the top of a rock that I found buried under finer gravel after removing all the larger rocks which were going to slide around and was able to turn around a bit. I moved my centre of gravity and the rock slid again, a few centimetres. Eventually, slowly, I was able to get back onto the little ledge/track. But suddenly the way I’d come up didn’t look appealing at all for going down. I stepped off the little ledge a bit and rocks slid around all over the place. They settled down but I felt like if I put my weight on them they’d just keep going. This was the first lesson I learned about scree. It’s like a WORM device - you can easily do stuff but you can’t easily undo it. Walking up was a breeze but then you can’t get down.

The snow kept falling very faintly, not enough to collect on the ground, but colouring the mountains a few hundred metres higher. But I was learning my second lesson about scree. Keeping your centre of gravity low is not a good idea here. It means that you’re pushing down on the rocks at a more acute angle to the slope and so stuff is more likely to slide. Rocks that were completely solid when I stood on them would slide alarmingly if I held onto them with my hands. Why do they never teach you this when you’re young? Everybody knows to keep your centre of gravity low but why do they never add “except when you’re on a scree slope”. Why isn’t it in the “things they teach you when you’re young” category along with “don’t stick a pencil up your ear”, rather than leaving it in the “things you have to find out for yourself” category along with “fun things to do with chocolate”? Anyway once I worked this out I was able to walk further along the little track thing and eventually find myself lower down on another slope of larger rocks which I could walk down to get to the river side. I imagine it’s like driving in Mumbai traffic - if you remain confident and don’t look around too much you’re safe, but as soon as you try to be careful it all goes to pear-shaped.

So we still hadn’t worked out a way to cross the river. We knew there had to be a bridge on the road three or four kilometres upstream. Anyway, there was no way to cross downstream from SECMOL. On the way back I encountered a herd of twenty deer, nibbling on the autumnal leaves of the beech (?) trees and the little clumps of dry grass along the river. They didn’t seem particularly scared of me. I climbed up a smaller hill, this time following the deer tracks, and came upon SECMOL from the back, past the rubbish pits outside their property which didn’t look that incredibly environmentally-friendly to me, but I guess they have no other option if there’s no garbage collection.

I never got to climb my mountain. It would have taken all day and I didn’t have a day off this week, since I had to head into Leh on Saturday so that I could get my flight back to Delhi early on Sunday. I guess I’ll have to go back one day to climb it.

The next morning I had to do another load of washing. I’d been putting it off too long and so I had more than one bucket-load, and buckets (for some strange reason) are in short supply here. I found that despite the cold and an almost complete lack of sunshine, the clothes I’d washed the day earlier were completely dry except in the places where they were frozen solid. I washed my clothes, hung them up, sat in my room for half an hour until my fingers thawed out, and walked back to the kitchen. By now it was about 10:00 a.m., but in walking past the clothes I’d just washed I saw that the jeans had blown off the line. I picked them up and despite lying in the sun and on dry gravel, they were frozen solid. I think clothes dry quickly here because of the dry air and the wind.

Actually it’s not as cold as I’d imagined, given that it’s now almost mid-November. There’s two thermometers in the small dining room, each with two measurements - the inside temperature and the outside temperature. They disagree a bit but during the day or even early at night, the outside temperature is seldom below 0 C during the day or early evening. The inside temperature is normally about 15 C so it’s not too bad. I was kind of hoping for an arctic experience and the chance to wear all my clothes at once. I guess I could blame it on global warming like everyone else here blames everything else.

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In conversation classes we break up into small groups - it’s handy that there’s a total of four volunteers now - and chat. There is a topic that one of the volunteers decides for everybody, but I usually just use it as a launching point to get the students to talk about whatever gets them speaking English and to talk to them about whatever interests them. The conversation topic today was “Tourism in Ladakh” ... do you think tourism has had a big impact in Ladakh? ... was opening Ladahk to the world a good or bad idea? ... is tourism good or bad today? ... that sort of thing. We swapped groups once in each session, meaning I got a total of four groups of between four and eight kids to talk with about this. They all know the date 1974, when Ladakh was opened to tourism. It seems ingrained in their psyche like the date of independence is for people from other countries. Everyone talks about how much clothing has changed. “Before” (I can never get them to clarify - probably because they don’t know - if they mean before tourism in 1974 or before development - roads, airports, schools, etc., - in the 1960s) people used to wear the goncha. They seem to think this change is a bad thing, but when I point out that no-one’s forcing them to wear jeans nowadays, they all say that it’s too hot most of the year and so for summer at least, Western clothes are better. They all say the same things, the things they’re supposed to say - that there’s both good and bad. The good things are that there’s more jobs and money for them; more chance to practise their English; TV, newspapers, etc.; better education; etc. The bad things are that their culture is disappearing, that there’s alcohol and other drugs, and that tourists come inappropriately dressed. After a bit of joking around even the all-boy group says that it’s “shameful” for tourists (both men and women) to come to Ladakh dressed in shorts and skimpy tops (presumably this only happens in summer!). When 17-year-old boys complain about women showing too much flesh you know deeply conservative mores are ingrained in their culture. Others talk about the end of nomadic lifestyles. One boy tells me that his family was nomadic until about five years ago. They look around the room ... “I think there’s only one or two here ” one says. I try to ask them if their parents or grandparents have said anything about the changes that came with tourism. One boy answers that before 1974 people had never seen anyone with a hair colour other than black. In another conversation it turns out that everyone’s parents had had an arranged marriage but few young people do this any more. One girl tells how her mother had a “steal marriage”, which I think is like "bride kidnapping" but I didn’t ask.


The intelligent, better English speaking, group, after prevaricating a bit in case I got offended, seemed to lean more towards the “tourism is bad” line. They ask about other countries and other cultures, and I tell them about countries that manage to live off tourists but keep their own culture, and others that don’t. I tell them that it’s up to them, the possible future leaders of Ladakh, how the rest of the story plays out, whether Ladakh will manage to welcome more tourists but keep its culture or whether it will go the way of Bali. It makes me feel old. To put my original questions another way I point out that some parts of India are still off-limits to tourism and ask if, hypothetically, some politician were to propose again locking Ladakh off from tourism, whether they would support it. This time they all say “no”. The conversation classes are interesting like this. The students seem to vary widely in English ability and in knowledge about Ladakh, India, and the world, but most are quite keen to learn about other parts of India and the world. Most seem more interested in politics than in sports, I don’t know why.

This week they changed the song we sing at dinner time. We no longer sing about Padum castle with its no less than four seasons, or cheating, philandering, Prince Norzang. We now sing a song called “Apo Cho-La Stotpai Chu” with no English translation or commentary. It does have the words written out phonetically in Latin characters though which is how I know what it’s called - I don’t know the Ladakhi/Tibetan alphabet.

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I still think the sky here looks more blue than other skies. Even some of my photos seem to have a darker-looking sky. I wonder if the thinner atmosphere means that there’s less air to refract the sunlight, making it darker? I tried to google for this when I went into Leh last Sunday but got distracted. I found something saying that at 3000 metres above sea level, the air is 30% less dense, and this decreases exponentially. Leh is just over 3500 m, and at SECMOL we’re not that much lower than Leh (although I think we are downriver from it) so I guess it’s possible. The stars are bright at night, but I’m annoyed that in all the places I’ve seen stars in the last nine months I’ve never been able to learn any of the Northern Hemisphere constellations and no-one’s even been able to point out the North Star to me. My theory is that Northern Hemispherians are star-illiterate, not like us savvy Antipodeans. Maybe it’s because we have the Southern Cross on our flag - I guess Canadians are good at finding maple leaves and Lebanese people would be good at finding Cedars of Lebanon if they hadn’t destroyed almost all of them.

There are other weird things about the altitude. I still haven’t completely got used to it. I still sleep strange. It’s the only time in the last ten years I’ve had more than eight hours sleep in one night but I don’t feel terribly refreshed. My appetite is gone but that’s maybe just because of the quality of food. This time my lips aren’t as cracked as last time, but my heels have both started to crack. It seems to be very dry air but I find I have to force myself to drink anything at all, somehow I don’t feel thirsty. There’s still times when I find myself getting out of breath, although normally I don’t notice it any more.

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Actually after writing all the rest of this blog, on my last morning there (14/11/2009) I woke up early and found that we’d had a nice fall of snow overnight. It kept snowing all morning, in fact pretty much the next day or two. The kids had fun pulling each other around in the snow and having snowfights, as it was one of the first good snowfalls there for the year. It meant that the taxi we’d ordered the night before couldn’t find the track, which is small and hard to find at the best of times. After two hours (during which times we were continuously assured that he was “on his way” we decided to walk to the main road and take our chances on a bus. Thankfully after we’d gone about two kilometres through the snow and me with my backpack, we met the taxi, still trying to find the road, now with snow chains fitted. The other volunteers who were still there and some of the students who’d come with us then spent the day in Leh while I spent the day in Leh and then flew back to Delhi.

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It’s kind of weird to think that in about 10 days (from the end of this week, which is probably a fair few days before I actually get to publish this blog) I’ll be back in Australia for a week. I find it hard to remember that it’s almost Summer there without any snow at all, not even on the mountains! Or that they don’t really have mountains in the first place.

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Skew is something the cook makes when he’s trying to save money. It’s made out of flour. The way to make skew is to get anyone who wants to help, whether or not they’ve washed their hands, to cut a massive ball of flour into smaller bits and then roll them between their hands into something like the playdough snakes you make when you’re at Kindergarten, then pick the bits off and squish them. You then cook it with some sort of sauce and throw in a tiny bit of vegetables. It looks a bit like ravioli and tastes vaguely (not much) like really bad gnocchi. It feeds dozens of hungry teenagers cheaply. I never wish to eat it again.

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Photos

SECMOL campus
volunteers rooms, boys' dorms, big dining room

SECMOL campus
shower blocks

Indus
Indus river, looking from a cliff at the edge of the SECMOL campus

Indus
Indus river again

Indus
Indus river again

Indus
... and again
you can see some small local farms in the distance

Indus
... and again

Solar panels
some of the SECMOL solar panels and the powerhouse

Powerhouse
SECMOL powerhouse

solar panels
with some of the mountains in the background

Indus
upriver from SECMOL

solar panels
all of the SECMOL solar panels

SECMOL campus
through the bare trees

SECMOL campus
the road leading out

SECMOL campus
main classroom building at dusk

recycling
SECMOL recycling bins

SECMOL campus
"greenhouses"