Sadhana Forest, India - beginning

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I'm staying at Sadhana Forest in Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India for 4 weeks as a volunteer. Sadhana is a reforestation project that is aiming to replant 70 hectares of Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest, a highly diverse forest with around 160 woody species, of which only 0.01% of the original remains. Much of the land that was originally covered with this forest has turned to desert and the water levels have dropped so much that people find it hard to reach fresh water and many streams and rivers have dried up.



A local tree nursery provides young trees for the project and thousands of volunteers come to work at the project every year – there are currently just over 100 people staying, but people arrive and/or leave most days. Around 1/3 of the residents are long-term volunteers and some have been here for several years.



The project has been running since 2003 and there are now many different buildings around the site – a main community building where we eat and socialise, a covered kitchen, a meditation/yoga yurt, a library/classes building, 3 large dormitories and around 10 smaller family/couples huts, plus tool shed etc.. They're all made from wood with reed roofs – really beautiful! There are also A LOT of toilets and showers, some outdoor, some covered, all separated drop toilets and bucket showers – simple, but they're all we need. There are also two big mud pools, which contain lovely clay mud, incredible when used as a face or hair mask! The water gets quite warm in the afternoons but it's refreshing to get in on a hot day – it's a surprisingly good way to get clean!



My journey here was more interesting than most – I left Heathrow on January 22^nd 2014 and turned 25 on the plane. I was sat beside the sweetest couple, who put up a Happy Birthday message for me to wake up to on the screen in front of me! When I arrived in Chennai my friend Sara who lives there met me at the airport and drove me through the busy city to her favourite cafe, where we got dinner and shared a chocolate mousse - a nice alternative birthday cake! She put me on a bus afterwards to Pondicherry, thank goodness – Chennai was crazy and I would have found it hard to navigate around on my own. The bus was a bit squashed but nobody had to stand for too long and it didn't take too long to get used to the beeping and constant overtaking that's to be expected in this part of the world, and everyone was very nice to me, though some stared a bit. I made it to my hostel around 11pm Indian time, completely exhausted from travelling for the past 24 hours! It was such a nice place – Aadhaar guesthouse – where I met a lovely girl at breakfast who gave me advice on travelling in India.



I caught an auto-rickshaw from Pondicherry to Sadhana Forest on the Friday, probably paying over the odds but just glad to arrive safely. I was met by one of the long-termers who showed me around and I met Thiery, who had also just arrived. After lunch we were shown round and taken to our 1^st floor dorm room, which houses about 16 people, each with a thin mattress, sheet, pillow and mosquito net. It's very comfortable and we have about a metre between beds, so it doesn't feel at all cramped. Friday is Tour Day, so around 100 extra people arrived at 4.30 and after an explanation of the values and aims of the project, we were all taken to look at the main forest and mud pool. I was surprised that most of the trees are non-natives: eucalyptus and acacia - I had expected most of the area to have already been planted, but it's a slow process and tree planting only began 5 years ago. Trees are only able to grow at all thanks to the huge amount of work on water conservation, which has raised the water levels several metres to their natural levels. Although the eucalyptus and acacia will be removed in the long-term, they currently contribute to the forest, by stabilising the soil, dropping leaf litter and providing shade.



Before dinner, we all sat in the community building to watch a film, “Life in A Day”, which depicted videos taken by people all over the world on a certain day in June 2013 – an interesting watch. It was nice to see something like that with such a large and diverse group of people.



We don't work too much on weekends, except for essential cooking and cleaning jobs, so I was able to spend those two days how I liked! On Saturday I cycled with Thiery to Kuilapalayam, one of the nearby villages, where I ate a tasty massala dosa for lunch. We went down to the seaside and paddled in the sea – three large white women turned up and stripped down to bikinis, met with an incredible surge of Indian men into our section of the beach! The women didn't seem to notice the attention and carried on swimming! My bike got a puncture at the beach and there was nowhere nearby to get it fixed, so we had to walk several kilometres back up to the village with our bikes – by the time my bike was fixed, it was past 4.30pm so we had to cut our trip short to cycle back for dinner. In the evening a big group of us went to an Indian Soufi music event...I was falling asleep for a lot of it – meditative music is not easy to stay awake during when you're tired!



I went to a really inspirational day-course on Sunday called “Peas vs. Pills” all about healthy eating, at the Sanctuary for Health And Reconnection to Animals and Nature (SHARAN). The woman who took the course was a trained doctor and nutritionist and was incredibly interesting and knowledgeable about a wide range of health impacts and benefits of different foods, as well as environmental and ethical aspects. It was a great start to my month as a vegan and showed how with a little imagination and effort, it can be simple to eat well and can make you feel amazing!



Monday was my first proper day of work. We work two SEVAs (selfless giving sessions) a day, the first before breakfast from 6.30am to 8.30am, and the second from 9.45am to 12.30pm – we work early in the day to avoid too much of the heat – it's 27^OC every day. We get woken up every morning by one of the volunteers singing and/or playing music and then have “morning circle”, where we stretch and hug each other good morning. My first session was “tree planting” and I planted 6 trees, so was really pleased! We plant trees in mounds we dig and surround them with humanure (2-year old human manure from the compost toilets) and mulch them with a thick layer of leaves. There are about 15 species to plant at the moment. My second SEVA was lunch cooking and I learnt to break and grate coconuts – 3 of us did 15 coconuts between us, it took a good hour!



On Tuesday morning my job was “tree care”, so I helped collect leaves and spread them on top of mounds, to protect the roots from the strong sun in summer. All week, my second SEVA is “bees and termites”. This involves climbing around the buildings looking for holes in the wooden branches that hold up the building, made by bees, and filling them with putty. It's a great job if you like climbing! Only problem is that it's almost impossible to get all the putty off your hands, so it means I've got a week of black hands ahead. I'll put up a photo of us climbing in my next blog, I forgot to take one today.



Hope you're all well!



Lots of love, Clare x

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Birthday
Always good to be exploring for a birthday.