Saturday, February 22, 2025
The Himalayas
“Steven, we can see the Himalayas. Shall we go and look?” was Surender’s excited greeting to me as I walked out of my room into the crisp mountain air, the sun illuminating the whole valley below. Absolutely. If those mighty peaks were going to be kind enough to reveal themselves, I wasn’t going to miss it. So, we headed up, almost running, to a place Surender knew to be the best vantage point. You never know how long the clouds are going to cooperate and the morning light is going to be perfectly cast on those snow caps. “That one is Bandar Poonch or Monkey Tail Peak,” he pointed out. The whole world knows the name of Everest, but there are thousands of mountains in this magnificent range. Monkey Tail reaches to about 6,300 meters above the sea. That’s over 20,000 feet for the Americans reading this.
Trekking through Raipur
Our plan for the day was another trek, naturally. It’s how you reach the villages and how you learn about Surender. Today we would head downward through an area called Raipur, joined by both Reeta and Manoj and another four-footed friend. The dogs here can sense when an adventure is on and are not to be left out.
We descended another of those notoriously steep roads past several guest houses and soon reached a well-traveled path through oak and cedar trees. Here and there early blooming rhododendron, the national flower of Uttarakhand, brightened the way. In a short time, the forest will be awash with their red and pink blossoms. In his young days Surender hunted in this terrain, sometimes staying out the whole night, or tramping through deep snow. He went after wild goats and pigs, barking deer, wild chickens and different kinds of partridges. But long ago he exchanged his gun for a camera and feels much more at peace for having done so.
The first house on the path
It wasn’t too long before we reached a small house and were greeted by its residents. Mother was washing dishes and the son, Rohan, was getting water for the cattle. He is a student at the Kaplani School. Father stopped to talk with us awhile. He and Surender had worked together on several projects and Surender has stayed in this house many times, just as he has stayed in houses all over these mountains, sleeping in the cattle shed when that was the only space available. Back in the day he would stay up late drinking local liquor and smoking local tobacco with the men, building bonds!
One of the first projects of MGVS was to run a water pipeline to this home and onward to other hamlets down the road. That was in 1986. Normally this is the government’s job, but the government said there weren’t enough people in this area to justify the expense. Seeing Rohan giving water to the cows gave a glimpse of just how important this project was. Without the pipeline, water would have to be carried from who knows how far away, up steep hillsides, not only for drinking by humans and animals, but for cooking and washing. It was a herculean task, and was nearly always done by women.
When the dog of this house started barking, our dog companion ran off to avoid a territorial dispute. As we moved on, he showed up again from somewhere in the forest, but just as soon as he appeared, he disappeared to run after a long-tailed monkey. Thus, I named him Achi Kochi, which means here and there in Japanese.
Trail chat
Talk along the way was random and natural as it tends to be on hikes. Those trees, with the branches cut, we call them telephone pole trees. Villagers feed the oak leaves to their cattle. But look at that tree over there, it hasn’t been cut at all. They keep it for God…. Those big leaves, we used to use as plates, and bamboo for cups.… In some of the villages around here, they speak a mix of Urdu and Hindi…. A wedding is the big event for a village. Everyone takes part…. When I got back from ARI, my boss said “what you have learned, please show me in the village.” So, I planted a vegetable garden. They were not growing vegetables before…. The government vaccination program didn’t reach here, so we arranged with families to bring their children to a central point to get vaccinated…. Those tents down in the valley, they are sherpas from Nepal. They bring their buffalo here for the winter.
We met three women coming upward and stopped to chat for a while. I couldn’t understand the words, but I imagine the conversation included some “where have you come froms” and “where are you goings?” and “How are your families?” Surender knew them, which was no surprise.
Patrani village
Eventually, we came to another home in the village of Patrani, and were greeted by another friend of Surender’s, who immediately served us tea. Some of the cutest kids you have ever seen were playing in the yard. By “kids,” I mean baby goats. Reeta and I went chasing after them with our cameras. This village was on the path of the irrigation project – 3.5 kilometers of pipeline were laid to reach it. Surender still remembers how happy the villagers were the day the water started flowing. No longer did they have to walk a kilometer to fetch water. The line has since been upgraded by government-installed piping. There is also an MGVS school here, built in 1974. It closed in 2018 because of no more children to attend it, and is now a kind of guest house. As I was exploring the property, I saw two young women in a doorway, the man’s daughters. They were both graduates of the Kaplani school and were now in college. After a few shy moments we took some selfies together! Unfortunately, Achi Kochi got in a fight with the resident dog and ran off, defeated. We didn’t see him again.
Rural leaders
Surender calls himself a “very local boy.” “I was born in a mountain village.” As I spent these short days with him, walking by his side, observing how he relates with the people, watching him point to every road and path and tell where it leads and who is living at the other end and how he did something to help them, I began to get a sense of what it was Takami sensei wanted to do when he started ARI. Takami sensei didn’t go to the poor places of the world with the idea that he might “help them,” or solve their problems. Very much the opposite, when he went to those places, he discovered amazing people there full of talent and commitment … and hope. He called them Rural Leaders, and in my imagination, he said, “They can do much better for the people than I can. So, what can I do for them?” And he started ARI. Of course, I don’t know the real workings of Takami sensei’s mind at that time, but as I meet graduates like Surender, one by one, and hear their stories, I feel like I am encountering the essence of ARI, the essence of Takami sensei’s dream. It is hard to describe these moments, except to say that what we are doing at ARI – I think it’s working.
Back to Dehradun
Since our outbound journey was downward, the return would be upward. This fact stayed quietly in the back of my mind as we descended, but now that it was time to head back, it jumped resolutely to the front. I missed Achi Kochi guiding our way, but in this good company, our journey back went lightly. Manoj headed straight to the kitchen and it wasn’t long before he had an excellent lunch prepared and soon after, we all climbed into the Mahindra for the drive back to Dehradun. As we descended, I saw a car on the side of the road, smashed top and bottom, as if it had rolled down a cliff not too long ago. It was a good reminder of just how precarious these roads are and how adept Surender is at traversing them.
Around certain bends and curves, you could see the whole of Dehradun, how it had already filled the valley and is now sending arms up narrow ravines. Surender got to talking of his ARI days again, which he summed up with the simple words, spoken more to himself than to me, “That program is very good.”
